I recently got a Poloroid PMID701C for $89 from Big Lots. I figured it’s been long enough I better break radio silence on my blog and write about my experience.
Here are the specs taken from this review:
- 7″ capacitive touchscreen (800×480)
- Android v2.3 Gingerbread
- 1GHZ CPU
- 4GB Flash, microSD card
- Wifi
- speaker/mike
- g-sensor
- TTS
- Video out (but no cables provided)
For starters, it’s not that great out of the box. No App store whatsoever, and what makes a good device, a great device is it’s apps. I must say that the browser was faster than the one on my computer as far as rendering pages. I couldn’t beleve how fast stuff rendered. Zooming in & out was very responsive. I installed netflix, but it just didn’t seem to work quite right. Lips weren’t syncing, and the video would stutter.
I installed the Amazon app store with a link provided on the desktop. Which is where my problems started. While amazon is a great company for getting stuff the android app store seems to be an afterthought for most developers, and more than one package I downloaded from there was an older version than I could get for my android phone from the google play store.
So I started hacking …
The first thing I did was a factory reset. The model I had was a display model, and I didn’t want to miss out on what Poloroid thought was a good experience, which sad to say was what I already had.
The next thing I did was attempt to install vending.apk which failed … sort of. At this point both the amazon app store, and google play’s app store were crashing. I would get to a 100% download, and then it would fail to install. After restarting, and reseting to factory again a couple of times I attempted to not install Amazon’s app store, and only the google play.
Duck Duck go is my friend, and I did some searching I found this site and the official update page
I figured what the hey I’d follow the instructions to install Android 2.3 because for all I know the vending.apk I had was bad, and perhaps Poloroid decided to add the google play store.
After the upgrade to 2.3 went off without a hitch I still didn’t have an app store. I attempted the instructsions from freektab.com’s forum post about installing google play.
By this point I figured that Amazon’s app store and google’s app store would crash if both were installed. You can’t install from one app store, and attempt to upgrade to another. I abandoned amazon’s app store.
So I figured what the hey, 2.3 worked why not try the instructions for Android 4.0. Wow, just wow. There’s an amazing difference between Android 2.3 and 4.0.
My $89 tablet now looked much better, I didn’t feel like it was a big waste of money any more.
Lather rinse & repeat it was time to try again. This time I decided to follow the instructions in the N4RPS balloon.
It worked! I got google play to go. I now how have an android tablet that run’s flash, Netfilx and all the other wonderful android goodness you’d expect.
For the record I had to adjust the video quality in Netflix from *Best* to *Better* quality on the settings page
Would I do it again? I don’t know, I like to hack, so this was a challenge to say the least.