Tabloid Update: Part 2

Good news and bad news.

Good news first: the tabloid (my cheap Android 2.2 tablet) still works!

I've started using Graffiti for input. This is a replacement for the onscreen keyboard and basically involves your drawing shapes on an area at the base of the screen. The majority of the shapes correspond to upper-case letters so are not hard to learn. There's a separate area for numbers and you can easily popup a list of shapes by drawing upwards off the top of the input area. Swapping back to the app can sometimes be problematic though. I first used this app on my HandSpring Visor PDA back in, erm, 1999 so it feels both familiar and retro. It also does word-prediction but some of the guesses are weird and/or earlier typos. Given that input is entirely silent, with not even the tiny pattering of virtual keyboards, it is also potentially seminar-friendly. Retro affection notwithstanding, I am purchasing a (similarly cheap) case with in-built (if somewhat cramped) keyboard.

One thing I didn't expect was the possibility of being able to program on these machines but I note that not only is there potential scripting support for the likes of Python via SL4A (not tried it) but also more generally via IDEdroid which sends your code off for remote compilation. OK, you can't do anything fancy but it's still a neat idea. Again, haven't tried it but goes on my to-do list, admittedly somewhere near the bottom. Proper cross-OS support is always going to be a challenge. I've only spotted LiveCode and PhoneGap as platforms thus far. I'm sure more will emerge but it's not a priority for me. The platform-specific Scratch-inspired App Inventor seemed off the agenda with the imminent closure of Google Labs but MIT stepped in at the last moment.

I'm still hoping to use TiddlyWiki/Space, i.e. the web, for mobile but the interface design issues are somewhat hard to get to grapple with if you don't have access to the hardware. I'm presently playing with a plugin that lets you change the stylesheet and hence tailor the layout to the platform. There's a couple of useful summaries of testing tools/strategies for mobile phone browser (iPad included as link in the second). Of course, you necessarily lose something in the transition so I hope Mozilla come up with something in this era of HTML5. At present, however, Firefox is one of the few browsers that doesn't run on the M009s so that is all for the future.

I am trialling Do It Tomorrow as a simple to-do list app. I suspect I may want something a little more fine-grained though, possibly a TiddlyWiki-based GTD tool. Workflowy also looks nice but does not run well on my system or offline as yet. I suspect it needs to be an app rather than a web tool.

I'm still using and liking Thinking Space. It does play very nicely with Freemind (and the related Freeplane).

In an effort to get out more now the weather has improved, I've used the tabloid both on the train and in a shaded outdoor area of a cafe. Not much good in bright sunlight, of course. Another indoor cafe has free wifi and it worked fine there too. Probably need to find out more about Firesheep and sidejacking issues though.

Bad news: the 30-pin connector was always a disaster waiting to happen and as I wandered round looking for a better signal for my 3G dongle, the USB adaptor and attached dongle detached, fell to ground and the dongle is now an ex-dongle. More generally, picking up wifi can also be a tedious process and I am still getting occasional freezes that require a hard reset. No progress with EduRoam (actually, I suspect it is a dead duck so have not pursued further) so I've bought into mifi instead (basically a mobile wifi hotspot for up to 5 devices). I've dropped this once but it survived OK. It works well on the train except when in tunnels (of course).

Someone alerted me to problems entering text in fields in Blackboard wikis using the default web browser. HTML source mode works though and apparently this is a problem for iOS as well.

I continue to use Google Reader for RSS feeds. I've added a few Google Groups and Twitter feeds as well. While I eventually got the hang of scrolling without firing up the record I was touching, the text display sometimes gets lightly corrupted. How to get stuff out of Reader isn't immediately obvious though there is a "send to" option under Settings for the likes of Delicious. JoliPrint can create a very nicely formatted PDF of a list.

I also have a corrupted icon.

I have learned to live with the battery life. It helps that you can use the tabloid while recharging.

Other news:
In terms of reference management, there's a third-party app for Mendeley called Referey though I haven't tried it and don't know whether it will be compatible. Doubtless an official app will be along in due course (there is one already for iOS).

Surprised to see even a basic Android PDB molecular viewer called PDBs.

ReactionGrid have an early version of Jibe running on Android.

The little company I bought the tabloid from has apparently sold 6000 to date! They now have a slightly more expensive version (£140) with a larger (still resistive) screen with GPS and HDMI output so you can project (on the iPad this is also a function of the app, not sure here). It also has built-in USB sockets (yay). As I'm not convinced that peering at the 7" screen is good for my eyes (though it's a good size for busy commuter trains), this sounds all good although it presently only runs Android 2.1 so I probably will not rush. No feedback either (feedback on the M009s tends to be mixed depending on whether you expected iPad quality for the price). Nice to see manufacturers exploring the low-end given that Android has not thus far been a huge success at the other end.

Indeed, the withdrawal of HP from WebOS tablet development and the large discounts now available on stock have driven the tablet to the top of the Amazon US charts and spurred initiatives to port Android to it. There are also new low-cost Android tablets on the immediate horizon such as the AndyPad and AndyPad Pro, the latter with capacitive screen and HDMI output. Meanwhile Seton Hall University in the US is trialling the new Lenovo ThinkPad. Many are expecting Amazon to enter the fray as well.

The other big surprise was that Google bought Motorola Mobile, in large part for its patent portfolio. Google, Apple and Microsoft look set for litigation wars. Quite how that will impact the various platforms and cost of low-end tablets remains to be seen.