No new years post this year…
My current interest is Asus T100TA Windows 8 tablet. More precisely: newer Z3775 powered version with a 500GB HDD inside keyboard dock and 32 GB internal (couldn’t find a 64 GB version).
A very nice and very capable piece of hardware with only one problem: Windows 8
While Windows 8 runs very nicely on this tablet (except for buggy Broadcom Wifi/Bluetooth drivers) there aren’t many good touch friendly apps available for it.
Windows Store you say ?
Most of my favorite apps aren’t there. And there are only about 200K Apps in Windows Store. The competitors Google Play and App Store have about 1.4 million (according to Wikipedia).
That’s where Android x86 comes to the rescue.
I won’t go into details of porting (that would require several posts) and just tell you that I’ve built a version of Android x86 4.4.4 KitKat which works on T100TA.
Not everything works yet (bluetooth, rotation, camera), but otherwise Android is fast and runs quite well on T100TA.
You can download my T100TA0 Android build, as well as some development files, from here:
http://raspis.ddscentral.org/pub/downloads/android-x86/
P.S. If you wonder about my old TF300T’s fate, I accidentally dropped it and damaged the touch digitizer… This requires a screen replacement and isn’t worth fixing as the new screen would cost as much as a new tablet. There’s another TF300T in my family. It isn’t mine, but I’m allowed to use it if I need to. It runs KitKat Cyanogenmod. Didn’t install Ubuntu there yet.