Tag: android

A look at the ePad

After hearing BIT Computer had an ePad (a slate/tablet device like an iPad, but running Android) I was curious to take a look as I’ve been looking for a cheap Android reader. Watching videos online with all these cheap Android tablets I knew not to expect much. So I managed to play with it and did come back with a few nice features that I wish other Android phones / tablets would implement.

The ePad has a 7″ screen with a resolution of 800×480 and thus is smaller than the iPad in terms of size and screen resolution. It also has a big bezel close to that of an iPad making it quite big for a smaller device. It has a single microSD card slot for expansion, a single 3.5mm headphone jack and a single micro USB port. It also has a front facing camera and a few other buttons on the side (power, volume up/down) and a ‘home’ button on the front (like the iPad). It is also equipped with standard wireless (presumably 802.11g) and even has an option for ethernet connection (I saw a PPPoE item in the settings).

There is a cable included with the device that converts the micro USB port to standard female USB port which can be used to attach a standard USB keyboard. I personally love this feature as I brings about possibility of using the device as a productivity tool to do regular word processing (Documents To Go is included with the device). I forgot to ask if you could attach a USB drive and have USB On-The-Go just like upcoming Nokia N8 which would allow you to transfer files to and from a USB drive making it more like a mini computer. The webcam seemed to auto focus and I guess it was taking a 320×240 snapshot, the screenshot application was not optimized for the screen resolution and thus had a weird layout (camera output was in a little section on the left and the ‘take picture’ button was all the way on the right of the screen).

Now the device is very unresponsive/sluggish. It was much hard to use than any of the cheap Android tablet videos I’ve seen online. I knew it would be slow and pretty hard at first but it was worse than I expected. After playing around with it, I found the touchscreen sensitive in certain locations but insensitive in others. Pressing the ‘back’ button in the top right corner was pretty hard but selecting input boxes and typing on the keyboard seemed pretty responsive.

The device has a custom toolbar on the top of the screen with custom buttons, most particularly a rotate screen and a screen snapshot button. A screenshot utility is something that no stock Android phone/device has even until now. You can install screenshot application only if you root your device which is not something I would recommend a typical user to do. This leads me to believe that this device could be running as root or that they have done quite a bit of customization.

Android 1.6 is running on the device and it has the Google Market Place among other APK managers/installers in order to install applications. It also has a full license of Documents To Go allowing you to view and edit documents. PDF viewing is done through Documents To Go but I was not able to view PDFs as it was requesting registration of the product in order to proceed. I was not able to test and video playback or web browsing as I did not have any videos on hand or Internet access. So I cannot comment on the abilities or speeds in those areas of the device. I will try go back to test them and take screenshots of all the applications installed.

While this tablet is far from perfect and isn’t a device I could really recommend, I like to see the possibilities that could arise. This device usability is a nightmare due to the unresponsive screen, but this is not an Android problem: it is just that the combination of the touchscreen technology used in this device and a slower processor is causing it. Recently Shanzai showed off a USD$200 Android tablet which seems to be pretty snappy, so it isn’t Android that is to blame. Check out Shanzai for more videos on tablets and at Deal Extreme for reviews by users with these devices. The Eken M001 is one of the cheapest tablets and firmware updates have sped up the device but still is underwhelming in terms of battery life (3 hours max). Another similar tablet would be the US$199 Archos 7 Home Tablet which actually looks better than any of these cheap tablets as it has a more polished product but has it’s own issues (720p playback, good battery life 5+ hours, but no Market Place and iffy touchscreen). Give me an improved version of the Archos 7 Home Tablet with a better touchscreen and slightly better battery life and I would be perfect. While the iPad is a very good product, I still don’t think it’s worth the price and I personally do not like the environment of iOS: I can’t even develop and test applications on my own device without jailbreaking the device or paying Apple for the developer program. I do not like those barriers of entry to a platform. So here I will be waiting for a better Android tablet

Of Keypads and Touchscreens

If there is one thing you’ll always use on your phone it will be the keypad/keyboard whether it is a physical one or an onscreen version. I’ve always seemed to prefer phones with traditional keys (non QWERTY) as I like having the tactile feedback and also the ability to blind type. With the past 2 of my phones (Nokia 3110c, Nokia E51), I’ve had the issue that the keys are pretty hard to press (i.e. it requires quite a bit of force to press down) so after a long text message or instant-message chats, my thumbs would get tired. This led me to look into the ‘clickiness’ of keypads of phones as I was looking for a phone under $200 recently (with Bluetooth, card slot for music, a 3.5mm headphone jack & preferably 3G). I was pretty disappointed with the results and only found the Nokia 6303c had a nice ‘light’ keypad which buttons not requiring too much pressure to activate (The Nokia 3120c was pretty nice too but not as good as the 6303c).

There are several factors playing into the physical keypad of a phone: button spacing, button size, button placement and button activation pressure (as mentioned above). With all these factors playing into the keypad it made me wonder whether touchscreen keyboards would be better. Currently I have my sister’s HTC Hero and managed to play with a friend’s iPod touch recently. So I managed to get a good feel for both of them and here are some takes on their usability.

Android (1.5) - QWERTY Keyboard layout
Android (1.5) - QWERTY Keyboard layout

Initially the Hero’s onscreen keyboard was frustrating to me – especially in portrait mode. It made me think I had fat fingers and it was painfully slow to type and correct any mistakes. There is auto correct which does a pretty good job but when it comes to words that it doesn’t recognize it can get frustrating. First of all if you type a word, it will display several suggested words (which it thinks you’re typing) above the actual word being typed. If you press space (to move on to the next work) it will automatically use the word it thinks you’re typing. An example is if I want to type “Bsb” it will auto suggest “Van” and if I press space it will replace “Bsb” (that I typed) with “Van”. Now you can add “Bsb” to the dictionary and it will be recognized the next time but this can be annoying if you’re using acronyms or names of places or just a language that it doesn’t understand (e.g. Malay). You can use the onscreen keyboard in landscape mode which makes this much easier for thumb typing but I think the lack of multi-touch implementation (there is multi-touch on the browser with pinch zoom) on the keyboard phone prevents users from typing even faster. At at times the keyboard lags behind the typing so you get delayed typing. In my frustrations of the Hero I honestly wanted to get a Bluetooth keyboard or find a way to use a Nokia phone as a Bluetooth keyboard. Take note that the screen size of the Hero is smaller than the iPod touch / iPhone and makes the keyboard mode even smaller and harder to type on in comparison. After a few days with it, I’ve managed to make it more manageable but still I had better results with the iPod touch in the limited time I’ve had to play with it. Finally I have switched the keyboard mode to phone keypad which emulates the typical 1-9 button configurations with the appropriate letters as a normal phone with physical keys and it can toggle predictive T9 input on or off easily at the touch of an on-screen button.

Android (1.5) - Phone Keypad layout
Android (1.5) - Phone Keypad layout

I can honestly say that the iPod touch (and thus the iPhone) has a very good onscreen keyboard: Apple must have done great user experience testing and I have to say they have got it nearly perfect. The onscreen keyboard was large enough to type with both my thumbs in the portrait mode with few mistakes from the little time I had with it. I know that they have tweaked the keyboard making buttons ‘bigger’ based on which letter is more probable and this worked well for the words in English that I typed. I found that the auto-suggested word is just as cumbersome as the Android implementation: when typing a word that it does not understand, it will only show a single suggested word (as opposed to Android’s multiple words) and pressing the spacebar will auto-correct it to the word that it thinks you are typing. To prevent this, just tap the ‘X’ to close the suggested word panel. It didn’t seem that you could add words to the dictionary from normal text input which means you could get frustrated typing non-recognized words (you can add words to the dictionary via Safari but its a bit of a kludge).

On both on-screen keyboards I wasn’t too impressed with inputting symbols. Perhaps I’m just not used to it yet but I found it too troublesome and time consuming to type symbols. After playing with on-screen keyboards I still like physical keys and honestly I like the way Nokia has implemented the keypads on their devices along with the symbol selection. So in the meantime I will look for a Bluetooth keyboard on EBay to see if anything looks good.

Related Article: A good comparison on the virtual Keyboards on iPhone and Android