SmartQ V7: Android, Linux and Windows CE
For the past 18 months, most of my free time has been focused on following and understanding the Android operating system. Since I only had a little Linux background, it has taken me a while to feel comfortable doing a big project with this OS.
It became obvious that I can’t hack on my phone. I need the darn thing too much to risk the downtime needed to fix something. I needed room to fail. What I needed was a device that was relatively cheap, had a lot of potential, worked poorly enough that there is a community of hackers who want to “fix” it, worked well enough that I would only face software challenges, and preferably had a GNU-Linux kernel (or the documents to build one).
Enter the SmartQ V7.
It met enough of the marks to be worthwhile, and has an active community forum at http://www.smatrtqmid.com/ so I’ll have people with other experience to help. Now I can try my hand at porting an Android Kernel and customizing Android. Since it has three operating systems, I can fall back to one of the other two while I try to fix Android. Also, it makes a very good e-book reader and it plays video files right out an HDMI port. But I would not recommend this to anyone for something other than hacking – none of the three OS is good enough to stand alone as a tablet operating system, and the device was targeted at Chinese customers (and I don’t read Chinese).
Anyway, this will be my Android/Linux lab for now. I’ll see about updating the Kernel, porting Android 2.x and maybe adding the cool optimizations from Cyanogen as time goes by.
It became obvious that I can’t hack on my phone. I need the darn thing too much to risk the downtime needed to fix something. I needed room to fail. What I needed was a device that was relatively cheap, had a lot of potential, worked poorly enough that there is a community of hackers who want to “fix” it, worked well enough that I would only face software challenges, and preferably had a GNU-Linux kernel (or the documents to build one).
Enter the SmartQ V7.
It met enough of the marks to be worthwhile, and has an active community forum at http://www.smatrtqmid.com/ so I’ll have people with other experience to help. Now I can try my hand at porting an Android Kernel and customizing Android. Since it has three operating systems, I can fall back to one of the other two while I try to fix Android. Also, it makes a very good e-book reader and it plays video files right out an HDMI port. But I would not recommend this to anyone for something other than hacking – none of the three OS is good enough to stand alone as a tablet operating system, and the device was targeted at Chinese customers (and I don’t read Chinese).
Anyway, this will be my Android/Linux lab for now. I’ll see about updating the Kernel, porting Android 2.x and maybe adding the cool optimizations from Cyanogen as time goes by.
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