I will state up front tethering takes a surprising amount of horsepower out of your phone and thus has a dramatic impact on battery life.

For comparison purposes I used Speedtest.net’s Android Ap and obtained 4347 kbps down and 1209 kbps running on Rogers 3G network sitting at my desk in Toronto with full bars (83%) of reception. If I wanted to be scientific about this I would run the test 10 times and average the results. Since I have a life … I will skip this

USB tethering is built into the Android OS and there is nothing to do but plug your phone into your PC and enable USB tethering on the phone. On my device it’s under settings, wireless networks, tethering, USB tethering. On the Windows side a virtual network adapter get’s loaded in and then that get’s an IP address and your done.

I used DSL reports to test the speed:

Using raw numbers this is 21% slower down and 29% slower up. USB has the advantage of maintaining the battery to some extent while tethered. If your running an operating system other than Windows you will need to find that virtual network card driver for your OS.

Next up you can use WIFI tethering. This is by far the most flexible way. The Android phone simply acts as an access point sharing out the internet. This works very well but takes more power especially if you turn on encryption. The ARM processors seem to be particularly poor at encryption algorithms and beat the crap out of the CPU and thus battery life. Of course the downside of using no encryption is that anyone around you could be using your connection too so this is something you need to watch. You can limit the number of devices and even allow only certain clients to connect.

This also uses the WIFI on the phone which also consumes power. With encryption tuned off and using the native tethering ap I obtained 4644 kbps down and 1128 kbps up which is 7% faster on download and 7% slower on upload. Obviously this is nothing more than variability on the speed test. The CPU while serving was sitting around 40-60%.

Turning on WPA2 using the native tethering ap got 3512/1137 kbps which is 19% slower down and 6% slower up. The CPU interestingly did not seem to be much busier. Battery life on WIFI tethering would be about 5 hours on my Droid 2 Global.

You do need to turn on WIFI tethering on your phone so it’s a manual step.

Last up is connection by bluetooth. This is something I worked on for a while before I got running. I found this bluetooth tethering thread that helped. For whatever reason on my phone pairing by bluetooth for the purpose of tethering totally pinned the CPU on the phones. From the moment it connected to the moment it disconnected. So while you save on WIFI power you loose on CPU. Bluetooth is also bandwidth limited so will be a bottle neck to your internet speed. On my device I had some issues with reliability of bluetooth tethering if you had used WIFI tethering which ended up requiring a reboot of the phone to clear up. No idea why. I was able to get 1443/1107 kbps which is the bottle neck imposed by the bluetooth interface. This is 67% slower on download and 8% slower on upload. Bluetooth bandwidth is 1Mbps for BT 1, 3 Mbps for BT 2 EDR and 24 Mbps for BT 3. Most phones today only have BT 2 EDR. BT on wikkiedia.

Of the phones I tested Droid 2 Global from Verizon running Android 2.3 and Droid Pro from Sprint running Android 2.2 supported Bluetooth tethering. HTC Desire Z from Bell running 2.33, HTC Nexus One running 2.36, Samsung S2 LTE from Rogers, and LG Gossip Pro running Android 2.35 did not. The bluetooth profile the phone has to support is called DUN (dial up networking).

I did a test of my Droid 2 and I figure I could get 5 hours on bluetooth tethering on a full charge so about the same amount of time as WIFI.

The other up side of bluetooth tethering is you can initiate it from the tablet itself without having to touch the phone! Of course the bad thing is that if you walk away from your phone it disconnects and does not automatically reconnect. And range is shorter than WIFI.

The phone comes complete with a nice mini charger, a headset and a USB data cable. So not a bad group of stuff. No case or screen protector is included.

The phone is very light and thin. A bit plasticy. I am not sure how well this will do on drops. The phone is for my daughter so she will put it to the drop test for sure! The back once removed is fairly plasticy but not as flimsy as either the Droid Pro or the Captivate I reviewed. Inside the back of the phone there is a micro SD slot as well as the SIM card and battery. The micro SD can once again be removed without powering the device off. This is only the second time I’ve seen that. The captivate being the other. A nice feature. The keyboard buttons are small and reasonably close together but have good feel. You definitely know you’ve pressed them! They unfortunately left off the voice button. A pretty major miss. There are dedicated buttons for email and calendar. And a button to allow you to change the language of the device. What a waste of a key.

The screen is reasonably bright and vivid. About middle of the market from what I have seen. It is a TFT screen so easier to read in the bright sunlight. It is competitive for the price range it is in. Default chosen fault is quite reasonable. The buttons on the front are a bit small and require a bit of pressure to depress but give a nice feel. I like real buttons Vs the soft buttons on so many phones.

The phone has a 3 Mp camera and no flash. It has all the usual tech, Bluetooth, GPS, WIFI etc. The GPS locked up VERY quickly. The battery is 1500 mAh so a nice size. The battery’s model number is a BL-44JN which seems to be a common battery for LGs so there were lots of them on ebay as well as external chargers.

Software load is VERY light and includes absolutely nothing from Fido. Very nice! I like that. No bloatware.

The phone feels zippy. It came with a 2G micro SD card so some space for aps data, and pictures. Obviously if you are going to use this for music or video you will be upgrading this. I tried my 32G class 10 card that won’t work with either of my Motorolas and it worked fine! And even did class 10 speeds! The phone supported AVI, MP4 video files just fine. I did get an error message about resolution not supported on a couple of them. Video playback was smooth.

The bluetooth stack did not include DUN but this is not uncommon. So no BT tethering. The phone includes WIFI hotspot and USB tethering though. They have it in the wireless settings Vs an icon.

Once the phone popped on the Fido network it downloaded a few Fido aps. Ringtones, set a few icons to the fido web site etc. All in all not bad. It has the fido APN by default something that I haven’t seen in so long because I’ve been using unlocked phones.

The music player is basic Android, but has no DLNA support unfortunately. The Calendar ap has some nicely added fluff. A nice built in clock and alarm is included but no count up or down timer support, so you will have to add an ap for that. The contact ap is clean and simple. Easy to use.

The phone is quite light on internal storage only 150MB, but any time the storage got below 100MB it complained. You can move apps to the SD card and save some space but this is the Achilles of this phone. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this stupidity, my 3 year old HTC Dream even had 192 MB. This is really low.

The physicals on this phone are amazing. On first impressions the phone is VERY light and VERY thin. The back door where the battery, SIM card and micro SD slot hide is cleverly done. There is a slide out mechanism on the bottom of the device that allows you to remove an all metal back. It is well built and feels solid. This micro SD slot is accessible without removing the battery. A first in a long time for devices I’ve played with. The phone itself has 16G of storage as well. I’m a big fan of internal storage that way programs have places to store their data without having to put it on the uSD card which creates a clutter of directories on the card as well as presents issues when the card is removed.

This phone is quite light. It has quite a plasticy feel. It does not feel like a solid or robust phone.

The micro USB jack is hidden/protected behind a nicely designed sliding door. Very well done.

The power switch is on the side of the display and easily reached to turn the device on.

And that’s about it for the physicals. All in all a nice clean design!

Power on the device and you see where they got the name. It really is one of the brightest most vivid displays I’ve seen. Head and shoulders above the Motorola Droid 2 or the HTC Desire Z. It really is … wait for it … captivating! Sorry couldn’t resist …

The soft buttons on the bottom of the screen are not overly sensitive and I found myself having to press them multiple times to get them to register. It got a bit frustrating. Not since the HTC Desire have I had this issue.

The specs at this point are nothing extreme, standard 1G Snapdragon processor. But it provides a nice responsive feel. The OS is at 2.33 and Samsung have done some customization. The launcher includes 4 buttons on the bottom of the home screens but unfortunately they are not programmable. So for me, one of them is the email client which I don’t use because I prefer the gmail ap so is a waste. Dumb. The application launcher does not by default sort the applications alphabetically but you can change that. The calendar ap is basic. I was hoping it would be the same one I like from the Galaxy tab I have but it is not. The contact ap has a nice feature to be on top of a contact and simply slide to call them. Nice. The contacts ap does not support favorites unfortunately. An odd omission. The music player is basic. Nothing special. No music matching, o lyric display, no internet radio, no cover flow. Like I said, basic.

The phone does not include bluetooth tethering for some reason. The standard USB and WIFI tethering options are there but Samsung call them Mobile AP (access point).

The 3G radio itself seemed to be slower than either my Motorola or HTC in speeds. No idea why.

The 32G Class 10 card that the Motorola wouldn’t work with works perfectly on this device. The speed of the card is working perfectly according to SD tools.

This phone interestingly supports video out using either a composite cable that plugs into the audio jack or it can output in HDMI format using a proprietary cable that plugs into the micro USB port. Wow. Impressive! (Caveat I have not tried either).

The on screen keyboard works fine and the chosen default font is ok. A little small but not bad enough to make me wanna root the phone.

The built in SMS ap is very basic but at least it does support threaded SMS. When a text message comes up and the screen is locked the lock screen shows a nice jig saw piece to show you the number of messages waiting for you and you drag it over to an open hole and the screen unlocks and displays the text message. Nice. The default lock screen is quite difficult to use. You have to drag it all the way up or down or out to unlock and all the way up or down is difficult with one hand.

The battery status increments in 1% steps, unlike the Motorolas that increment in 10% steps. Battery life on this phone is amazing. By my calculations standby on data could be as much as 31.7 hours. With WIFI tethering on battery life could be about 7.1 hours. Stunning in comparison to my Motorola or HTC phones.

So let me save you some time and cut to the chase. Of course the details are below. If your going to play content off a network share, skip the stock firmware, use WDLXTV, skip trying the browser and go right to hard coded xmount shares.

Out of the box I was shocked at how small the device is. The output flexibility is impressive. It can handle composite, component and HDMI. Audio wise it has HDMI, optical and stereo. Impressive. And they include the component, composite and stereo cables with the unit. No HDMI cable was included. I bought a spare at Bewawa a place recommended by a friend and I was happy with my experience with them.

Right out of the box the device detected there was a new firmware when placed online. I am still shocked at how difficult the router companies make it to update their firmware. Come on folks get with it. Even my Linksys E3000 is much harder than it should be to update the firmware. Updating on the WD was simple and easy, it just did it. The remote for the device is uber small and did not come with it’s AAA batteries. Oddly the unit did not come with a manual either. After about a 5 minute process the player downloaded it’s new firmware, rebooted and came back up all nice and shiny new. Oddly enough once updated it found yet another much more current firmware release and so the process started yet again.

On top of local content it supports internet content from the likes of Blockbuster, facebook, flickr, Pandora, netflix and many more. The weather content did not include any Canadian locations. Thanks WD.

Plugging in a USB flash drive was easily found and played smoothly. After a power off the USB device was not recognized and I had to unplug it and plug it back in. Nice feature, NOT. Of course a feature is simply a bug you didn’t fix

Network discovery on this device is VERY poorly done. The device relies on a network browser. If the browser happens to find the computer your serving from then your good to go. You enter a userid/password if needed for the share and away you go. Unfortunately my servers were not seen. And one was seen and then not. Whatever this is using as a network browser is buggy at best. And unfortunately they did not allow you to simply enter a file share manually. And the userid for authentication can not be on a domain or this won’t work either. I was really disappointed at how poorly this was done. This made it problematic at best, frustrating as hell at worst. There are tons of posts out there with people with this same issue. Why WD doesn’t address this is beyond me.

The device is quite slow to power up. It takes almost a minute. Not sure I would be powering it off much. Except, it really does get quite warm so must be consuming a reasonable amount of power.

So once I gave up on the stock firmware I installed WDLXTV. They have taken the stock firmware from WD and improved it. There is a web interface, a telnet/ssh interface both of which make configuring the device and manually adding shares possible. The web interface also allows you to use a web browser as a remote control for the device.

Once loaded I figured out the silly syntax of the xmount command using telnet and then added it to the auto mount so it would work on power up. The auto mounted shares show up like local content so you need to have a USB flash drive on the device or the local content menu doesn’t show up. All of this is pretty well documented in the MANY posts on using this thing to control network shares.

I tried with no success to use domain userid/passwords and eventually gave up.

Once I had all the network stuff figured out (this was key because all of my movies and music are on network shares) the player works very well. Playback is bright, vivid and smooth. No interruptions. Sound quality was good but there is no volume control on the WD remote so you are reliant on the TV or receiver’s volume control. Oddly once the show was done it moved onto the next file in the directory or started replaying the same one if there were no others. The prev/next worked flawlessly moving between files in the directory. It remembers where you left off on any show you had started which is nice. There is no way to delete content once watched which is a major miss in my opinion. In preview mode when you are scrolling through files to find the one you want it immediately begins playing the file which slows down navigation significantly.

The device by default automatically shares out the USB drive you plug in allowing you to copy to it over the network. This works ok but is kind of slow. It got around 3M/s.

They have brilliantly added support the NTFS based drives. This is very important because the max file size for a FAT32 partition is 4G and many of the hi def movies are bigger than this. Yay!

I tried a CD/DVD USB drive but it was totally ignored.

The code is suppose to support movie sheets to give you details of the movie file you are hovering on. The movie sheets are manually offline prepared. I couldn’t get this going as was the ONLY obstacle for replacing the PC beside the TV. Without it you are stuck looking at the name of the file and trying to remember what the movie was about. Pooh.

I didn’t play a lot with music playback but it is quite basic. It supports tags and does allow you to select by album, artist, genre etc. In album mode it didn’t see the artwork but in folder mode it did. Playback of an individual file showed the artwork of that file. All in all it works but don’t be expecting anything too impressive. It’s basic.

Photo playback is also quite basic. No transitions in between photos, no ability (that I could find) to change how long the picture stayed on the screen. You can set shuffle and replay modes. So it works, but nothing elaborate.

I can’t even begin to tell you how long setting up this device took. The issues were all around network shares. From USB all was simple and easy.

This device is very manageable remotely. It includes telnet, SSH, FTP, and SFTP all built in. With Winscp it’s possible to completely automate content management of the device.

DLNA is fully supported both from a media, share and display point of view. Well done.

This device works well and has a plethora of options for connecting it. It’s small allowing it to fit in easily to any environment. No noisy fans either. It does generate a reasonable amount of heat. For the low price they are charging for this device it is impressive.

I’m shocked at how different the DLNA interface is across platforms, but I’m equally shocked that this actually works!

More reading on DLNA.

Out of the box I was surprised at how heavy this is. A stark contrast to the uber light Droid Pro. It really feels solid. Compared to my HTC Desire Z (also called HTC Vision) the slide out keyboard feels kind of klunky, but robust. Feels like the sliding mechanism ought to last. The keyboard itself is quite good. Much better than the Droid Pro and on par or better than the HTC Desire Z which I still have. One of the longest phones I’ve owned. As usual the checkout the list of smart phones I’ve played with , if your curious.

The outside of this phone is a scratch and chip magnet. Happens easily and really shows. A shame for a nice design. The materials used on the outside edges seem to be VERY soft plastic. The screen itself seems quite durable.

It’s always a problem when the power switch is raised so much that it easily get’s turned on in your holster or pocket. Well Motrola has insured this ain’t gonna happen. It’s so recessed it’s actually difficult to power on. To the point it gets frustrating just to turn this damn thing on.

The screen on this one is the same as the one on the Droid Pro but bigger. It uses TFT rather than the newer OLED or AMOLED. The screen is not as bright or vivid but it is much easier to read in bright sunlight and takes less power.

Blackberry included a magnet in their holsters (which I use a lot) to lock their device. Well it seems Motorola chose to use a magnet in the docking station for this device to power on the device, by pass the screen lock and bring up the car dock ap. This took me quite a while to figure out why when I put the device in the holster it would power on the screen. So either pay for an app that disables this (requires root) or make sure you are using a holster without a magnet. Nice … NOT. There is an inexpensive Motorola dock for this phone. It’s a nice piece of piano black plastic with a weighted bottom. Unfortunately the only thing it does is charge the device. No audio out on it. There are two different magnets that can be detected by the device. The first is what they call the multimedia dock which is the desktop dock. This launches a very nice clock with weather ap. Oddly I can’t find how to manually launch this program. The second is a car dock that launches the auto ap.

The Droid 2 Global includes a CDMA modem for use on Verizon (where this phone came from) as well as a GSM phone to allow it to be used around the world. The frequencies match Rogers so I can get full 3G frequencies. Motorola has done a much better job of the CDMA mode on this one. It does not continually insist on being on CDMA after any reboot or crash like the Droid Pro. The GSM controls are well done allowing you to control GSM/UTMS modes to allow you to save power. The Droid Pro on GSM at best is frustrating, at worst it is unusable. The Droid 2 Global is a much better experience. You can totally forget that this even has a CDMA phone in it and use it purely as GSM phone!

As with the Droid Pro my 32G class 10 uSD card would not work reliably. Even after the Android 2.33 upgrade. Seems like it’s more likely hardware related. I tried another 32G Class 10 and it too did not work. That’s two cards from totally different manufacturers so it definitely seems like an issue.

I assumed the software would be identical to the Droid Pro and it was similar but different too. The tethering software was not as buggy. The music player I was impressed with on the Droid Pro is gone and a new one is on this one. It has some nice features like a cover flow view similar to an iPod. Missing is the ability to play internet content or identify songs, or display lyrics as the Droid Pro’s music player had. So a little step forward and big step back.

The Bluetooth on both these phones works better than on the HTC. They connect faster to my car stereo and display message received on the stereo’s display anytime a text message comes in. Nice.

I decided to root the phone (using a simple tool called SuperOnecClick) when I got it to be able to change the default text. Motorola must have a good vision plan because both this one and the Droid Pro use a small font that I find hard to read. I do admit my vision is on the edge of requiring glasses. I used this opportunity to remove some of the preloaded aps that I didn’t want/need or would not work in my area. This turned out to be a bit problematic. Seems Verizon or Motorola decided they would not allow you to update your phone if you had previously rooted it. So I went on a quest to find the original ROM which after 3 or 4 hours I managed to get installed. In the end I used a tool called RSDLite version 4.9 to load back the original ROM from a file called VRZ_A956_2.4.33_1FF_01.sbf. This took a number of tries with a number of different versions of RSDLite with a number of different ROMs. Like I said lots of time burned. But in the end I was able to put back the original ROM allowing me to upgrade to the new firmware from Verizon OTA.

The software updates by the way are only available if you are on a cell network. If only on WIFI it won’t even let you download it. And before figuring out root was the cause of my woes I downloaded the updates numerous times, only to get a failed update message with no clue as to why. And it took 45 minutes or more to redownload the update. All in all a frustrating experience.

Once this was solved the OTA update came down and went in updating me from VZ 2.4.330.a956, Android 2.2 Base N01.48.05R Kernel 2.6.32.8 to 4.5.608.a956, 2.3.3, N_1.80.00R, 2.6.32.9. So a major update. And I can not believe how different it looks. Some are UI tweaks, some are the usual hide and seek (move things around and see if the customer can find them and re-get use to them until the next update) and some I assume are actual improvements.

SuperOneClick was still able to root it once the 2.33 upgrade was in place. So I sent off a donation to say thanks. Without root I couldn’t change the fonts, couldn’t turn off the silly docking magnet etc. So enough reasons that root on this device was a MUST.

With the update in place this is the fastest, slickest, best experience I’ve had on Android to date. Now this comes at a cost. Battery life. It is by far, hands down the worst of any device I’ve played with. Think 10 hours of background data etc. Really bad. The spare batteries are readily available (on ebay), cheap and small enough to carry a few. If your going to be away from a power cord for any length of time with this puppy you will need a spare battery (or two). I will have to spend some time playing with things to see if I can do any better on battery life.

Bluetooth keyboard and mouse work perfectly. In fact this is the best of all of the phones I have tried BT mice on. The mouse works exactly as it should. On most phones the mouse isn’t even worth bothering with. It does nothing but slide the screen left and right. Well done Motorola!

If I had paid full price for this phone I would be unhappy but at $100 this phone is a bargain.

Converting an Android apps to run on a playbook is a two step process. First you need to repackage them from an APK to a BAR. Then they need to be signed. If you can find a BAR file ready to load your one step ahead. Of course personally I wonder how old the APK is, and did anything bad get added to it by the person who packaged it. So I preferred to do it myself.

I found a document on how to convert APKs to BARs

I also found a spreadsheet containing a list of APKs that have been converted to BARs along with with a status of whether they run or not. You will notice the websites the BARs are on are largely WAREZ sites so that always makes me nervous.

So since I have a process for how to convert an APK to a BAR I need the APKs. Fortunately I have a rooted phone this is dead easy. Using the android developer kit you can grab any installed APKs from an android phone using adb pull. The apps are generally stored in /data/app.

Here’s a list of what worked and didn’t for me that I converted:

Worked ebuddy 1.83, TorrentFU, Jewels by MHGames, ebay, EStrong File Explorer 1.6.0.7, ANDFtp

Failed Amazon Kindle hangs on boot, another one loaded but wouldn’t log on (odd cause I know folks that have this running, Sudoku Daily Free crashes, Go Mobile from Ryerson crashes, Flixster Force Close, Shazam loads but can not record the music to identify.

So unfortunately my luck was not good. But none the less it cane be done and shows us where they are heading and it looks good once in place. The big question is will Android developers bother. Guess we will have to wait and see!

The process through RIM direct was not the best I’ve ever had. They were slow to ship. Something they told me as they were backlogged from the sale. I ordered it on Nov 29th and they said 5-6 days. In the end I received it Dec 11th. The odd thing they never sent me a shipment notice, and never required a signature so when I wasn’t home they left it on the front porch in plain view. Good I live in a safe neighborhood. Otherwise someone would have got an early Christmas present. Funny enough the next day I received a notice that the device shipped.

As a level set my current tablet is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 (single core) running Android 2.2. My work Berry is an archaic 8830 so no bridge mode will be possible. I’m only at Version 4.5 of the OS and version 5 is minimum.

One of the things that changed my mind on the device was Android compatibility. This is key to me given the abysmal number of native apps for the device. That and email. I learned the beta is freely open and adds Android compatibility. When it first arrived it noticed there was a new version of the OS and it pretty much insisted on loading it. Silly since I was going to put the beta on it anyway. But I let it do it’s thing. The update process is smooth and slick. To get the beta you go to RIMs site, enter your PIN and email address. The playbook itself will then detect the new OS and allow you to install it. I did it straight off. Without Android this device is useless to me. Yet to be seen if it is useless to me anyway

Physically the device is a little thicker, boxier and heavier than my Galaxy Tab. The screen is brighter, crisper and move vivid.

Straight off one of the first things I notice is the desktop is devoid of useful information. No widgets, no calendar nada. The desktop is basically a visual task manager to allow you to start, stop and switch to running aps. This is a bad decision on RIMs part. What are we all butt heads?

In the continuing saga of unfinished software, if you can believe it, in today’s day and age the onscreen keyboard does not have any auto capitalization, no spell check, no auto correct. Nada. So your typing away on a native ap, say facebook and your on your own. Unbelievable. Come on.

The device includes the ability to mount it’s internal file space on a Windows compatible file share. While this works well it is dead slow. Averaging around 1MB/s on WIFI. Oddly enough the USB connection also mounts as a file share. With this I got about 4.7MB/s. I would have expected it to show up like a flash drive like most other devices. Trust RIM to do things a little differently. But at least you aren’t tied to something like iTUNES …

RIM have been terribly unsuccessful at get developers on board this device IMHO. It runs QNX, a different version of the OS from all other Blackberry products. So Joe developer that wrote something for the Berry’s has to recode for QNX. Now RIM are moving to make QNX the OS on all Blackberry’s sometime in the future, but come on. Was there really no way to make existing aps for Blackberry run in QNX? And yet you can do it for Android? Sad. So the net result of this is that there is a pathetic number of aps Native for the playbook. There is a facebook Ap. And it is reasonably current.

Out of the box the device supports DIVX/XVID and MKV video files. From the video screen you can manage your content and delete it locally. There is no need to go through any kind of itunes like program (ooo I was thinking of so many nasty adjectives to describe how much I LOATH iTunes) to manage your content. For me this is a MUST. The video player did not seem to remember when I left off. Something that is VERY annoying. Video playback even to HDMI was quite good. The high def movies looked stunning even on a 47″ TV! Unfortunately it does not seem to support DLNA.

The device comes preloaded with Need for Speed and while I am not a lover of the way it’s controlled it looks fabulous and plays very well on the device. It really showcases what this hardware is capable if there was good code available for it. Sad …

Bluetooth keyboard and mouse worked well within the native apps but the mouse did not pass into the Android apps.

The beta of the OS that is out now adds the Android compatibility but sadly still lacks email, calendar and contacts. Yet again a tale of unfinished software. I wonder sometimes if RIM have acquired the software designers from ATI

Android will be a game changer when this version of the OS becomes final. It’s hard to say exactly but from what I have read/heard Android apps that a developer chooses to submit to Blackberry will be available in AppWorld. They will show up just like any other ap. You may not even know that it is an Android ao. This has the potential of opening up the door to whole new world both for Blackberry as well as for the developer.

I will say right up front, the current state of Android on the playbook is for hackers and geeks to setup. The average consumer will be unlikely to have the time or patience to play with it.

For now, once loaded (another post on loading and converting aps is on the way) the Android ap shows up in the menu just like any other ap. The Android aps are all kept in an Android Player. The Android player is kept some what walled off from the other parts of the playbook. If a trap occurs in the player it shouldn’t take down the OS. And you can close all Android Aps in one action. The Android player include a back button to simulate the hardware back button on Android devices. For now the installs are static. Unlike on Android where you are informed when there is a new version of the ap available you will need to keep an eye on your favorite code and manually update it as you see fit.

Android Aps have access to the same file space as the playbook aps. So this means you can download content using Android aps (for example) and play it with native apps. A very nice touch. You do need to place content in the appropriate place (movies in movies folder etc) for the playbook aps to pay atttention to it.

LCD and LED screens are very similar. The difference is in the back lighting. LCD use a fluorescent back light and LEDs use LEDs to back light. The LED is brighter, and more vivid as well as more expensive. Of late the gap between LED/LCD has been closing, sometimes as little as $100. The LEDs also draw less power.

This latest go round in choice had a unique requirement. The TV was to be mounted on a brick wall. This presents some unique challenges. First of all thickness becomes an issue. The LEDs are quite a bit thinner than LCDs. Secondly and not related to the screen type is the hookups on the back. In some cases where you are going to mount it on the wall you can cut a whole in the wall to let the cables connect and come and go. In this case that wasn’t possible. We looked at the TVs at Future shop and discovered most come out the back of the TV at right angles meaning you either need to buy more expensive right angle cables of leave a gap to back of the TV. Samsung’s had cleverly brought the cables out parallel to the back of the screen leaving no issues with the wall. Unfortunately all the Samsung’s we looked at LED and LCD has a glossy finish to them. No where near as glossy as plasma but still not idea. In the end we found 1 LG model that had a mat finish and had the cables coming out parallel to the back of the screen. It was a LG 47″ 1080p 120Hz LED HDTV (47LV4400) .

Some TVs are considered “smart”. So are the others dumb? The smart TVs include the ability to surf the web, do facebook, stream from Netflix etc. The can also play some movie files which you can put on a USB key or the like. The benefit is that it is an all in one. The negative is that you may need to add a player later if you run into a limitation it can’t do, or if the firmware is not kept current by the vendor. For my $$s we chose to go with a dumb TV and buy a player.

Next up was the mount. We did not care about tilting so we wanted a flush mount. In the end we chose a Sanus generic mount. It attached easily to the TV and was secured with 4 bolts to the brick. They included a variety of bolts for the back of the TV as well as a variety of options for mounting to everything from wood to brick. The kit was complete. We had to buy a drill to go into the brick but that is to be expected.

Google decided to create a base font in the operating system to insure all apps look consistent. They gave the system integrators the choice of font and font size at build time. The unfortunate (ok flat out stupid) thing Google didn’t include was the ability for the end user to change the font or size. WTF. This was in Windows Mobile 2003. Stupid. So on the Droid Pro it was so bad on the small screen I could not read it without my glasses. Now I admit, my vision is getting marginal after years of staring at screens. But I don’t think I am the only one. And thus started my Quest.

Rooting is basically prohibited by the system integrator and is actively pursued to stop. Some even put in measures to detect and remove root if granted. Others insure the ways they use to prohibit rooting change so that methods use to obtain root must constantly adapt. Every time you get an over the air update to your base OS you are at risk of loosing your root and not being able to get it back until the end user community has found yet another way to thwart these haneous actions.

Rooting almost always uses an exploit, a hole in the OS. They use this hole to get a foot hold and then pry themselves in.

There are all kinds of different ways to obtain root and you need to research your specific phone to find one that will work for your device, for your version of the OS. Don’t be surprised if you read about a method that works only to discover it doesn’t work on yours (perhaps because you are on a newer version of the OS).

Some of the rooting methods involve programs that run on your device, some that on your PC and some that are so low level you have to replace the ROM. Yikes. Replacing the ROM involves a process that if not followed correctly can result in an expensive paper weight, referred to as bricking. I know cause I did it on one of my devices

When I started working on this I found references to Z4Root (which runs on the device) which lots of people insisted worked. Well it turned out a recent over the air update broke this. It was not easy to tell if Z4Root had actually worked or not. I didn’t get any good or bad messages from it, it just stopped after a bit of time doing something. No idea what. I found an ap that would very simply test if you had root or not called Basic Root checker. This really helped.

The next method I saw discussed was called SuperOneClick. This one ran on the PC. This seemed to run and insisted it had rooted the phone. I used a number of methods to discover it had not. Again I found out the OTA update had pooched this one as well.

The last method I read about referred to use a Windows scripts called aroot. This one is cryptic but did the job and was simple and easy to use. Alas I had root!

A lot of the font changing apps require Busybox so this was the next up to install. In fact the program I wanted to use had a very specific version of busybox that had to be there so I let it do it’s thing.

At the core of Root is an app called Superuser. One of the confusing things I found was that Superuser was on my device. Superuser is suppose to pop up any time an ap is asking for root and request permission. This was never happening. Another indication that I didn’t have root. Once root was properly established Superuser worked like a charm.

There are two different parts to the displayed font, one is the font itself and the other is the size of the font to be used. I did not find one ap to do both. Spare Parts is free and allows you to change the size but not the specific font. I found another ap called Font Changer to allow you to change the default font. It however does not include any fonts and bad instructions how to add them. I found fonts at Dafont as well as 1001 Free fonts. Once downloaded and unzipped you copy them into the default directory for fonts (look in the settinsg for the font changer ap for the directory) and boom there they are. I also found a paid app Font size that allows you to change the font size.

Once all this is done you have complete control of the fonts displayed on your device. A reboot is required to change them unfortunately. You will also have to play with sizes. Get them too big and your menus, quick actions or message bars don’t display right. You have to find a combination of something big enough for you to see and small enough to be useable within the OS.

In addition to changing the fonts there are other programs that require root. Adding tethering for example. So once rooted you have a lot more options open to you.

Word of caution once rooted, be careful doing over the air updates you may loose root. If root becomes a must for you don’t do the update. Motorola it seems have been aggressive in changing their root prevention and detection methods. Silly really. Who owns this phone again? Who is the customer?

As a point of reference this burned about 4 hours to figure out …