Last Friday (almost 5 days ago) I got my hands on my brand new AndyPad Pro tablet, a low-cost Android - Gingerbread - Tablet. And now I shall write about it. Beginning with the good stuff.
EDIT: First of all, I want to state that support in the official forums is fantastic. I get responses quickly by the administrator regarding my problems, and even though solutions are not apparent or directly available, there seems to be a lot of true interest to these problems.
Games perform impressively well! Videos too.
You just might want to install Mobo Player and set it to
software-decoding in case you encounter videos the original player
cannot play properly. The screen is very nice. It has a cool virtual keyboard (which unfortunately I had to substitute with - almost equally good - Multiling Keyboard that had support for Greek). Responsiveness is good enough (not perfect). Sorry for not elaborating on the above but that's only because I decided to elaborate on the negative aspects of the device below...
It's not a big secret on the web by now that the software needed more attention. I guess that's why the creators of the tablet are so eager to let other developers make their own, custom roms (I think Modaco is working on one already).
Google Maps and GTalk are absent. Maybe because there's no 2G/3G and GPS support on the device. I installed Maps myself and it would give force-close errors when I booted the device, so I removed it again.
One of the first things I did was to install Launcher Pro, since it works super-smooth on my ZTE Blade and eventually it does too on the AndyPad. The original launcher is not bad, but has some noticeable lag during its animation.
The only problem I've encountered that actually matters to me is related to the heart of a tablet system: its Wi-Fi. If I turn the wi-fi off while connected to a network, then turn it on again, my previously working network will appear on the list as "not in range". The solution is to long-press it, choose "forget", then scan again for networks, grab it and reconnect. If I choose to check Advanced Wi-Fi settings while connected, the whole wi-fi settings system will crash, setting the wi-fi to Off, never letting me to connect again. The solution now is to reboot the device.
Some colours of the custom theme the AndyPad rom is using are incompatible with certain apps. For example, they use a light blue background instead of the default Android black one, which can be a pain when you have light-coloured fonts in certain apps that use Android's backgrounds (the light blue in that case) instead of having their own.
The AndyPad Pro has a 1024x600 screen. Even if you load a new high resolution image as wallpaper, you'll notice it becomes badly stretched, with obvious pixelation, as if its been stretched from a lower resolution. I had to install a Background HD Wallpapers (or something like that) application from the market to have proper resolution wallpapers working, well, properly on the screen.
Twitter (any client) and Facebook (only tried the official one) display the wrong time for posts, exactly 1 hour back. For example, if someone (even myself) posts something RIGHT NOW, I will read "posted one hour ago".
Tom the Cat 2 had some audio glitches on short-duration sounds, playing a Spongebob video had me notice that the L and R audio channels sound inverted. But maybe those were just unlucky cases.
Well, I will come back with further details and more positive commentary as soon as the first (of a bunch?) custom rom or an official software update shows up. All I have left to say for now is that I have not regretted buying it, since it does what it should in respect to what it was advertized to do (though the CPU is down-clocked to 1GHz "for stability", instead of being at 1.2GHz as it says on the box), and the potential with future rom updates is quite promising.
