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Android

Update (9/7/2013)
I bought Google Chromecast (again running Android) for $35 with Netflix 3 months.  Initially I was not able to cast from my Windows 8 laptop even though Nexus 7 has no problem in casting.   It turned out that Chromecast uses a private network and it won't work if you have other private networks like Hyper-V or Oracle VirtualBox due to the quality of Google programmers on Windows.  After disabling Hyper-V, I was able to cast from my laptop.

I owns Google Nexus 7 tablet (Latest Android OS).   I found that Google Nexus 7 is very self-centered or arrogant that they only support MP3 for audio and MP4 or H264 for video.  No reviewers mentioned this deficiency.  Thus I was initially converting WMV audio to MP3, but it is such a pain that I bought Poweramp.  The other vendors like Samsung and LG provide player for free (or included in the price).  Another deficiency of Nexus 7 is that it can do USB OTG (On-The-GO) only for keyboard and mouse but not for the harddrive (i.e. it is clippled intentionally). 

I found a serious defect on Acer Iconia A500.  You usually hit power button many times.   On my tablet, the power switch is only soldered on to the motherboard, even though there are two through-holes to secure the switch for a different switch module type.  Because of this, the power switch part fell out from the motherboard (weak solder).  I tried to solder it but the part is too small and thus it is half-working.  It is now unusable. I regard this as the QA deficiency on Acer, since it is not using the right part for the switch. 

I just bought Acer Iconia A500 Tablet with 16 Gbyte storage which came with Android 3.1 Honey Comb.  This was a bargain from Staples with a $100 off coupon.   I never had a tablet before and thus it is really weird doing most of the things with touching the screen.  The first thing was what kind of gesture I should do for a particular task.  For example, I could not figure out how to remove my accidentally dropped application icon in Home until I read the User Guide.   It turned out that holding the icon produces the waste basket on the top right corner and thus you drag the icon into the basket. 

Updated: 7/30/2011 

Index

Can you show me the storage partitions?

Knowing Linux, I wanted to know how the 16 Gbyte of the SD device is partitioned.Here is the df output.


  /dev      361M  
  /mnt/asec 361M  
  /mnt/obb  361M  
  /system   590M  
  /data     12G  
  /cache     1G  
  /system/vendor 29M  
  /mnt/sdcard  12G  
  /mnt/external_sd 14G (this is the one I added with a 16 GB microSD card)  
  /mnt/secure/asec  hidden

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How can I get my Iconia rooted?

In order to make Iconia useful, I need the root access.Here is the instruction page http://androidflip.com/how-to-root-acer-iconia-a500-with-stock-honeycomb-3-1/. After the installation, I was able to install busybox.  When you have <b>Terminal Emulator</b>, you can do <b>su</b> to become root.  You can now see /sbin directory.

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Where is fstab on Android?

It turned out that Android does not have fstab. The initalization is done by /init.rc.

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