{"id":434,"date":"2012-05-09T17:23:04","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T23:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/?p=434"},"modified":"2012-05-09T17:23:04","modified_gmt":"2012-05-09T23:23:04","slug":"poloroid-pmid701c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/?p=434","title":{"rendered":"Poloroid PMID701c"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently got a <a href=\"www.amazon.com\/s\/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&#038;field-keywords=PMID701C&#038;tag=thelinactsho-20\">Poloroid PMID701C<\/a> for $89 from Big Lots.  I figured it&#8217;s been long enough I better break radio silence on my blog and write about my experience.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Here are the specs taken from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.the-digital-reader.com\/2012\/03\/25\/first-impressions-of-polaroid-pmid701c-7-android-tablet\/\">this review<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>7\u00e2\u20ac\u00b3 capacitive touchscreen (800\u00c3\u2014480)<\/li>\n<li>Android v2.3 Gingerbread<\/li>\n<li>1GHZ CPU<\/li>\n<li>4GB Flash, microSD card<\/li>\n<li>Wifi<\/li>\n<li>speaker\/mike<\/li>\n<li>g-sensor<\/li>\n<li>TTS<\/li>\n<li>Video out (but no cables provided)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For starters, it&#8217;s not that great out of the box.  No App store whatsoever, and what makes a good device, a great device is it&#8217;s apps.  I must say that the browser was faster than the one on my computer as far as rendering pages.  I couldn&#8217;t beleve how fast stuff rendered.  Zooming in &#038; out was very responsive.  I installed netflix, but it just didn&#8217;t seem to work quite right.  Lips weren&#8217;t syncing, and the video would stutter.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>So I started hacking &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The first thing I did was a factory reset.  The model I had was a display model, and I didn&#8217;t want to miss out on what Poloroid thought was a good experience, which sad to say was what I already had.<\/p>\n<p>The next thing I did was attempt to install vending.apk which failed &#8230; sort of.  At this point both the amazon app store, and google play&#8217;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&#8217;s app store, and only the google play.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/duckduckgo.com\">Duck Duck go<\/a> is my friend, and I did some searching I found this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freaktab.com\/showthread.php?491-****OFFICIAL-Polaroid-PMID701c-THREAD!-root-market-and-more!\">site<\/a> and the <a href=\"http:\/\/southerntelecom.com\/polaroidsupport\/updates_PMID701c.html\">official update page<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I figured what the hey I&#8217;d follow the <a href=\"http:\/\/southerntelecom.com\/polaroidsupport\/firmware_guide_pmid701c23.html\">instructions to install Android 2.3<\/a> because for all I know the vending.apk I had was bad, and perhaps Poloroid decided to add the google play store.<\/p>\n<p>After the upgrade to 2.3 went off without a hitch I still didn&#8217;t have an app store.  I attempted the instructsions from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freaktab.com\/showthread.php?491-****OFFICIAL-Polaroid-PMID701c-THREAD!-root-market-and-more!\">freektab.com&#8217;s forum post about installing google play.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>By this point I figured that Amazon&#8217;s app store and google&#8217;s app store would crash if both were installed.  You can&#8217;t install from one app store, and attempt to upgrade to another.  I abandoned amazon&#8217;s app store. <\/p>\n<p>So I figured what the hey, 2.3 worked why not try the <a href=\"http:\/\/southerntelecom.com\/polaroidsupport\/firmware_guide_pmid701c40.html\">instructions for Android 4.0<\/a>.  Wow, just wow.  There&#8217;s an amazing difference between Android 2.3 and 4.0.<\/p>\n<p>My $89 tablet now looked much better, I didn&#8217;t feel like it was a big waste of money any more.<\/p>\n<p>Lather rinse &#038; repeat it was time to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freaktab.com\/showthread.php?491-****OFFICIAL-Polaroid-PMID701c-THREAD!-root-market-and-more!\">try again<\/a>.  This time I decided to follow the instructions in the N4RPS balloon.<\/p>\n<p>It worked! I got google play to go.  I now how have an android tablet that run&#8217;s flash, Netfilx and all the other wonderful android goodness you&#8217;d expect.<\/p>\n<p>For the record I had to adjust the video quality in Netflix from *Best* to *Better* quality on <a href=\"https:\/\/account.netflix.com\/VideoQuality\">the settings page<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Would I do it again?  I don&#8217;t know, I like to hack, so this was a challenge to say the least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently got a Poloroid PMID701C for $89 from Big Lots. I figured it&#8217;s been long enough I better break radio silence on my blog and write about my experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.the-erm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}