Yesterday was ferociously hot, so I did what I usually do when it’s too hot for gardening, and played with some old hardware, this time J’s old Lenovo IdeaPad K1, an android tablet dating from late 2011.
In its day it was pretty slick, slicker than the zPad, and a pretty nice bit of kit with an excellent screen - being an artist J spends a lot of time looking at pictures and illustrations - but it was a bit heavy to hold, and even though we'd invested in stand cum charging station for it, it could be a pain to use for extended periods. Not only that, it would occasionally lose its network connection, or more accurately not recover gracefully when our router flipped from adsl to the backup 3G connection, so eventually it was replaced by a Samsung Galaxy.
By the time it was replaced, Lenovo had more or less abandoned the K1, but had unusually, provided an option to upgrade it to an unsupported version of Android 4 - the K1 having originally shipped with 3.2.
We never followed that up at the time, as the only thing I used it for was downloading podcasts, and gPodder was happy with things as they were.
In retrospect, this was probably not such a good idea, as the links to the generic version have now (understandably) disappeared off of Lenovo’s website.
So, what can you do with 3.2?
Well, no modern browser, but Opera mini installs and runs quite nicely.
The previously installed wikipedia, gmail and twitter apps still work as does inoreader - an rss feed reader. You can’t, of course install anything recent, which means no decent text editor or anything like that.
But, given that most of what I use my current tablet for is wikipedia, email and twitter, plus a bit of rss feed reading it isn’t a disaster. Not having access to OneNote or Evernote is a bit of a pain, but were my existing tablet to unexpectedly come to a bad end it would be good enough for a stopgap, which isn’t too bad for a device over six years old running an old operating system ...
In its day it was pretty slick, slicker than the zPad, and a pretty nice bit of kit with an excellent screen - being an artist J spends a lot of time looking at pictures and illustrations - but it was a bit heavy to hold, and even though we'd invested in stand cum charging station for it, it could be a pain to use for extended periods. Not only that, it would occasionally lose its network connection, or more accurately not recover gracefully when our router flipped from adsl to the backup 3G connection, so eventually it was replaced by a Samsung Galaxy.
By the time it was replaced, Lenovo had more or less abandoned the K1, but had unusually, provided an option to upgrade it to an unsupported version of Android 4 - the K1 having originally shipped with 3.2.
We never followed that up at the time, as the only thing I used it for was downloading podcasts, and gPodder was happy with things as they were.
In retrospect, this was probably not such a good idea, as the links to the generic version have now (understandably) disappeared off of Lenovo’s website.
So, what can you do with 3.2?
Well, no modern browser, but Opera mini installs and runs quite nicely.
The previously installed wikipedia, gmail and twitter apps still work as does inoreader - an rss feed reader. You can’t, of course install anything recent, which means no decent text editor or anything like that.
But, given that most of what I use my current tablet for is wikipedia, email and twitter, plus a bit of rss feed reading it isn’t a disaster. Not having access to OneNote or Evernote is a bit of a pain, but were my existing tablet to unexpectedly come to a bad end it would be good enough for a stopgap, which isn’t too bad for a device over six years old running an old operating system ...
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