Hi there,
The market is flooded with $100 or less ARM based tablets (usually 7"), but finding one with unlocked bootloader is a quest....
So any brand/model I should know about?
I was about to buy an ages-old HP touchpad just because I read in the forums that dual booting android/linux was possible, yet the thought of just 1GB ram makes me feel uncomfortable, as I know today's Chrome browser can easily eat up 1GB all by itself.....
And brand name ones (eg Samsung) are way out of my current budget.
I know there must be a niche player somewhere in Shenzen pumping out ARM tablets with unlocked bootloader....
Any leads/ideas? thanks in advance...
FC
On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at 6:35 PM, Fernando Cassia fcassia@gmail.com wrote:
Hi there,
The market is flooded with $100 or less ARM based tablets (usually 7"), but finding one with unlocked bootloader is a quest....
So any brand/model I should know about?
There's a bunch of AllWinner tablets that are unlocked that should work. I say should because with all the cheap tablets it's a constant moving target because they'll change screens, touch interfaces, sound codecs and wireless chips so it's a tail chasing process and we really don't have the resources, both financial to buy all of the various revs and human to work out the changes, write the bits needed, and test it all, so it's not really a market we chase. I think this is felt similar by other traditional Linux distros as well as other more focused on that market such as LineageOS and their similar level of support for such devices.
I was about to buy an ages-old HP touchpad just because I read in the forums that dual booting android/linux was possible, yet the thought of just 1GB ram makes me feel uncomfortable, as I know today's Chrome browser can easily eat up 1GB all by itself.....
I'm not aware of a cheap tablet that offers over a gig of RAM that we support.
And brand name ones (eg Samsung) are way out of my current budget.
I know there must be a niche player somewhere in Shenzen pumping out ARM tablets with unlocked bootloader....
All of the AllWinner tablets are in this category but see issues above, if there's tablets based on the Rockchips 32xx SoC they might be an option but I'm not aware of any. There's a handful of AllWinner reference devices (they appear on the market in many iterations but have the issues mentioned above) that we have enabled and have has reports of levels of success but you'll likely need to roll your sleeves up and deal with kernel stuff to get the last mile.
Any leads/ideas? thanks in advance...
Honestly not really, it's not an area we focus on, not because it's not attractive but with limited resources we need to focus on best bang for buck (whether that be project/company/personal) in terms of usage and that is currently the SBC/IoT/Server/Embedded style device and to a lesser extent Chromebooks/Laptops as that where the users/contributors are interested.
P
FC
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On 6/4/17, Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
There's a bunch of AllWinner tablets that are unlocked that should work. I say should because with all the cheap tablets it's a constant moving target
Thanks Peter, I will keep an eye for Allwinner SOC based tablets and see what I can find.
It puzzles me to see high end quad core and octa core SOCs, shipped w 2GB and 3GB of RAM but only as "tv boxes", yet no one seems to bother to install those SOCs on a tablet form factor. Puzzling,indeed.
Most of those use AmLogic SOCs... eg http://www.ebay.com/itm/XGODY-DDR4-Android-7-1-Octa-Core-S912-TV-BOX-2-16GB-...
Linux kernrl seems to ne available... https://github.com/LibreELEC/linux-amlogic
Why no one seems to be making tablets based on this SOC is beyond me. I can only think of thermal issues and power consumption...
Oh well... FC