Phone and tablet discovery

[Suff]

Earlier this year my 10.1 Android tablet sent itself into brightness mode 0, but even before that it had lost the ability to use it's SD card.

I'd tried a few things but never really been able to get into the thing to try and fix it. I really wanted to change my phone and I wanted the Huawei P8 Max with a 6.9" screen, plenty of memory and 64 gig of storage plus the ability to stick a SD card in it.

Only one problem. You can't get a P8 Max in this country and it would cost me £400 for the model I wanted. So that was on the back burner.

In Feb I bought an 8" windows tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard and holder. £130 the lot. Worked OK but Windows10 home is not so good for what I want. I tried to upgrade to 10 Pro and wound up with the digitiser out of sync with the press. After weeks of trying to get it resolved, including the manufacturers website, I've designated it as "scrap" until I can work out how to get android on it. Pity as it's pretty quick for what it is.

When I went walking a few weeks ago I was in PC world and found this



At that price.

Two sim cards, 8" tablet, takes a SD card and 16gb on board. I put it in the Bluetooth keyboard holder and set about setting it up.

Yes it's a phone and it works. Tablet works, Archos have created a fusion app which makes my 64 gig SD card look like it's part of the internal storage and, best of all, I can do my work on it with my remote work Citrix session after I downloaded the Citrix receiver.

All goals in one for £80.

Then I went looking about. I bought myself a set of Bluetooth headphones with microphone and can do calls with it. I bought a Bluetooth mouse and that works too at the same time as the headphones and the keyboard.

I already had an azerty Bluetooth keyboard so I tried it with that. Success. I could plug in the charger and run the keyboard, mouse and headphones on it.

Excellent. Now I need to transition off the Samsung phone which will take a while. The Archos is not fast as it's only a dual core. So it may take me a while. Also it's not as portable as the Galaxy Note 2. However I'm not using it for calls except incoming work at the moment. So that is not so bad.

Having had all that success, I went to have a look at my tablet and have another go at it. Through dint of much hard work and swearing, I worked out how to set the tablet into flash mode and flash an Android 6 image to it. Great but the screen size was wrong. More swearing and reading to work out how to get the driver installed and connect to it inside windows with and ADB shell and then I could enter the commands.

It was pretty cool being able to type the commands on my laptop and watch the tablet reboot with a new screen resolution. In the end I got it back to what it really is (1280 x 800) with the right DPI.

Again, installed the apps I wanted and checked the work connectivity. Which worked. The only problem left was the SD card. Today I pulled it apart and had a look inside. I was in the process of examining the circuit board when I noticed an extremely bad soldered joint on the SD card (most of the contact had no solder on it at all.

I'm taking it home with me this weekend and will get the soldering iron out and repair the bad solder.

The only downside on this is that the 10.1 tablet will only stay connected to one Bluetooth device at a time. But, it has two USB ports (the Archos only has one). One is for normal charging and the other is for the OTG host cable. So I've got my Logitech wireless mouse and an OTG cable in my bag, the Bluetooth keyboard stays connected and I have the charger connected to the primary usb port.

In the end it seems that for a bit of effort and £80 I might actually have managed everything I want. OK I'd like a faster phone, but, actually, my windows phone is fine for that and the biggest issue I always had was that my phone was too small to really surf on or read books on.

I'll update after I've soldered the SD socket.

[Workingman]

Suff, there was a time when I would have been at the other side of the bench doing much the same, but I have given up now. I don't need super fast or super huge memory things any more. What comes out of the box is just fine.

However, my laptop, tablet and phone are all now Windows machines with all the crapps removed. Thankfully there are like minds out there with the ability to produce softwares to help me out. Everything I have is now mean, clean and lean and working just how I like them.

Good luck with your endeavours, it will be interesting to hear how things work out.

[Suff]

One broken solder joint.



One not so very well re-soldered join (although the soldering iron is not so very good either)



And my tablet can see it's SD card again.

Sadly I appear to have borked the cameras though. Not that I _ever_ used them or ever intended to. So I'm not going to try and fix it...

Success... . Now I need an SD card to put into it and to go looking for a fusion app like the Archos tablet has so I can use it all as a single space...

[Workingman]

What the hell did you solder that with, an iron bar?

If you had been patient I could have sent you my electronics soldering iron with the interchangeable super fine nibs.

Edit: Would you credit it?

I found the iron and four nibs in a tin - pencil point, rt angle, curve and straight point - and the shoe for the hot iron to sit in. Can I as hell find the wattage switch box.

[Suff]

:lol: What the hell did you solder that with, an iron bar?

Looked like it through the two pairs of glasses I was wearing so I could even see the joint properly. Even though it comes to a fairly fine point. I could not find my iron which has a very fine point on it. So I "made do".

It works, it's not coming apart. Job done...

[Suff]

An interesting point. Whilst setting it up I found that my new Android 6 (marshmallow), tablet is refusing to install apps. Like Easyjet and Santander banking. Complaining that my tablet was not compatible...

I'd already had an issue finding my Ankoo neo app for controlling my remote sockets, so I had Android Assistant installed.

Eventually after switching my brain on and watching a YouTube video, I realised that I could just backup those apps from my other tablet to apk files (using android assistant backup tool), then copy them to my Android6 tablet, using my PC and install them from there . Which is exactly what I did.

Useful to know when you have more than one Android device and they are being fussy. Both apps installed and are working fine.

[Workingman]

That is what I did with my old "Here Kitty Kit-Kat" Experia.

I couldn't be doing with all ths 'Create an account; Sign in; do you want email updates, pay or free, yadda, yadda.

There are a few decent sites with .apk files for download, but as with everything 'download' the files need scanning.

I ditched a load of pre-installed crapps despite the OS screaming "no, nO NO!". All I wanted was a minimalist browser in order to check webmail and a bog standard music player with simple playlists. Found them.