Shiny thing: SmartQ V7

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It's shiny thing day again! With my tax refund burning a hole in my pocket, I couldn't resist buying one of these. It's a 7" tablet which triple-boots Android, Ubuntu and Windows CE. All for less than the cost of my Sony reader. If you read reviews of this thing, they're fairly negative, based on the fact it's a crazy-ass hackjob thrown together in the back streets of China, with odd hardware and more quirks than you can shake a stick at, that doesn't know what the hell OS it wants to run when it grows up. It in absolutely no way resembles a smooth, polished product. Anyone who's ever paid any attention to this blog should already have figured out that's why I bought it. =) Crazy hack job which requires forum-researched tweaks, firmware flashes and Linux knowledge to do anything useful with? Sounds right up my street. If the thing actually turns out to be practically useful it's great, but if not, hey, I'll probably have $250 worth of what I consider 'fun' before I send it off to someone as Fedora ARM research material. It's win-win, baby. Good thing I figured out how to un-DRM my ebooks...

Comments

Amir Hedayaty wrote on 2010-04-10 19:20:
Hi, that looks like a good piece of hardware, but I will not be able to afford buying and not using it! So how is it in general, does Fedora work well on it? What about graphics card? (nothing mentioned on graphic card on the specification) And what is there 3G system? (This maybe optional for me)
adamw wrote on 2010-04-11 00:51:
I didn't get it yet, only ordered it. Dunno what the graphics adapter is, but it must have something capable of hardware accelerated video playback in there. No 3G, but it's supposed to have Bluetooth so it ought to be able to do BT tethering...
yungchin wrote on 2010-04-11 12:10:
Heh, awesome. After all the doom and gloom ("tinkerers' sunset" and all that) people have been posting about the iPad, I'm glad our collective winter-depression is over. Yay for crazy hack jobs!
AdamW on Linux and more » Blog Archive » The SmartQ V7 is here wrote on 2010-04-19 22:57:
[...] SmartQ V7 I wrote about arrived this [...]
Sergei wrote on 2010-06-16 07:47:
Hi! so did you get this toy? I'm looking for an inexpensive touch-screen tablet to use to take orders in a restaurant. Is it possible to install Java on this little thing?
adamw wrote on 2010-06-16 22:56:
yes, I posted a follow-up a few days later, check my archives. I don't know if you can install Java on it, but I wouldn't bet on it. If OpenJDK can be built on arm, then possibly there is. Check if the Debian package archive has an arm build of it...
steve wrote on 2010-07-26 12:45:
i got mine at allpmp.com, which is an authorized online reseller. http://www.allpmp.com/goods.php?u=19287&id=38
JOe wrote on 2010-08-23 20:20:
Okay...so you're going to go ahead and spout pointless opinions of the device before you've even received it and had time to play with it? You're kind of an idiot, dude.
adamw wrote on 2010-08-23 20:27:
yeah, uh, you realize you're commenting on a five month old post and there's several posts after that one with my actual impressions of the device? and that this post doesn't actually contain any of my opinions, just my reportage of *other people's opinions*? but hey, merry christmas to you too, buddy. in case you hadn't noticed, this is my blog. I'll post what I like in it.