My experiences with custom roms, stock firmware, and the state of Android Tablets

fragilio

Member
Nov 22, 2010
4
0
I recently had the opportunity to enjoy a truly eye-opening experience and wanted to take a few minutes to share it with you all today.

Many months back I purchased a Eken M001 from Hong Kong. For those who don't know about the M001, it's a VERY SIMPLE android "tablet" device. It had what appeared at the time very poor resistive touch, a badly handled UI, and very little battery life. However I used it sparingly to test an Android software build (app/native code) against a simple and non-important device. For that purpose it worked well.

Yesterday afternoon I stumbled upon a custom "ROM" for the Eken M001 on slatedroid.com. I got up the guts to install it and.. well.. WOW. It was a cleaner UI, battery life was improved, heck even the touch screen was more responsive. In fact in a short period of time I found myself using it to browse twitter, ebay, play chess, etc. Amazing!

A device I had once chucked in a drawer and thought was useless now had a purpose. So, I guess the realization here is that the "Software makes the hardware great." and that bad software/stock roms can make what could be a potentially good experience very, very bad.

Thanks!

-f
 
Top