Friday, February 10, 2017
My new tablet!
My new tablet!
To recap my experience with the Coby Kyros 7005, it was a disaster from the get go. Upon arrival, I quickly discovered that the tablet was in fact locked and the password had been lost. That was not a big issue for me though. After fiddling with it for a few minutes of rebooting and holding different button combos, I managed to get the device to boot into the stock recovery. I performed a factory restore and BAM! I was in. The performance on the 7005 was AWFUL and I discovered quickly that the power cable was not charging it. I dismantled it and started reading things out with a multimeter when I found out that the batteries were toast. I looked up the part number for the batteries but only came up with a UL registry number and some technical specs for the batteries, but couldnt for the life of me find anyone selling them. So I fiddled with the tablet for a little bit, experimenting with ROMs and recoveries (it was a throw away at this point). Eventually, I just formatted the whole thing and sent it back to the seller for a full refund.
From the experience though, I did discover that with the proper amount of tweaking that these inexpensive tablets could be coaxed into out performing much higher priced devices for a lot less coin. After receiving my refund, I turned around and bought a Coby Kyros 7015 (which turned out to be a 7015A) from my local Frys Electronics store. After dealing with the shipping hassles, I decided it would be best to buy a tablet locally so that I could just bring it in and get it exchanged in the very likely even that I ended up bricking it. Sure, I may have voided my warranty but Im pretty sure that the clueless sales personnel at the store dont know that and have no way determining why my new tablet isnt turning on either.
I can gladly say that I have not bricked my new 7015A (yet... knock on wood). When I got it, just like its cousin the 7005 it was PAINFULLY slow. Android 2.1. No market. No flash. Couldnt play Angry Birds, or really do much of anything for that matter. Even had problems getting it to stay connected to the Wifi, but I had no intention of sticking it out with the stock firmware anyway. I looked around on XDA for a while but didnt find anything except for the same page Id already found when messing with the 7005. Its a forum thread for an unofficial port of Cyanogenmod 7 to Telechips devices. The Coby Kyros 7015 was mentioned, but the 7015A was not officially mentioned anywhere on the thread so I started looking elsewhere for information. Eventually I came across two forums, the "Android Tablet Zone" and their sister site dedicated entirely to the 7015/7015A "Kyros Tablet Zone".
To make a long story short, my membership on either forum was revoked after only a couple of days because I criticized one of the mods for using a poorly written disaster recovery tool to develop and flash his crappy partially translated Chinese Gingerbread ROMs. I posted a much easier and safer how-to on his forum for flashing Cyanogenmod 7 and a far more updated version of Clockworkmod Recovery than was available on the Kyros Tablet Zone forums. Apparently my idea of helping others get the most out of their tablets while posing a much smaller potential to brick devices, while updating to a newer version of Android than his crappy ROMs could pissed off the mod and I was summarily banned from both sites and accused of "FLAMMING" and "SPAMING". The mods handle on a bunch of forums Ive come across (including xda-developers unfortunately) is Tipstir. You sir are an overgrown man-child. First of all, before you jump to conclusions and accuse someone of something, make sure that you can spell what it is that you are accusing them of. Secondly, you need to learn how to accept criticism where it is due. Using a disaster recovery tool as your primary method of flashing ROMs is just plain retarded. So fuck you, and enjoy bricking your tablets with your shitty, poorly written Chinese garbage firmware. Dont say I didnt warn you.
The worst part about the whole ordeal is that AFTER I had to partition my hard drive and install Windows XP and then deal with XP driver hell, and then HACK MY OWN ADB DRIVER just to be able to use this guys shitty software, I discovered that flashing CM7 could be done the EXACT same way I did it on my phone (factory reset and format /system, then flash through the recovery like normal) now my 7015A is stuck with some logo for some off brand Chinese electronics company instead of the regular "Coby" boot screen and I cant change it back. I will forever be reminded of what a douche-bag moron Tipstir is every single time I turn on my tablet so thank you for that, you ass hat.
But anyway, now that Im done playing around with the script-kiddies over at Kyros Tablet Zone and all their infantile bullshit, Im happy to say that I am running Gingerbread 2.3.4 on my 7015A. Of course, it needed some heavy tweaking to get it to perform decently. First, I increased the VM heap size to 48 (typically I use 32 but I got the best results out of my tablet with 48). Then I disabled surface dithering and disabled compatibility mode. Beyond that most of my tweaks were just interface tweaks, like remapping the "home", "menu" and "back" buttons to "Volume Down", "Volume Up" and "Home" respectively. I got flash working on it and then I went through and absolutely gutted the /system/app/ folder, removing almost all of the phone oriented apps, the camera app, etc. I still get occasional FCs while running the Market but that is the only thing that doesnt work flawlessly. Thats better than it was stock, when I was getting constant FCs without having Market access!
After installing a handful of choice apps like Mobo Player for .avi playback, the Google Music beta app and of course Angry Birds now my tablet is about as perfect as its going to get which is pretty damn good for a $150 tablet.
Available link for download
