Trying out an aPad

The iPad has been echoed as the aPad - a much cheaper (nearer $100) device that uses the open source, Google Android operating system rather than all the proprietary Apple stuff.


I got mine from Tradestead where you will see some unbelievable prices. The device is an Eken M003. It runs Android 1.6 (up to version 2.1 at the time of this post).


The exciting thing about an aPad is the potential to start developing Android apps so this leads to some initial problems to resolve about which I will post in the future:

• root access to the device
  Making changes requires more privileged access than is given by default so this needs to happen
• adb access
  adb (Android development bridge) is the application that the android developer kit provides for access from a development machine (Linux, Windows or Mac) to a device - my M003 in this case
• Uprading the Android version
  The essential issue here is that the device is not wrecked - there must be a recovery path