[pfontaine2]

Hi all!I'm new here (obviously) and became interested in Android tablets when various members of my local user's group purchased the Pandigital tablet at our local Bed, Bath and Beyond. I thought the tablets were horribly slow but still caught my imagination.I'm interested in art, animation and music and am interested in purchasing a tablet that might make a good portable sketch pad. I prefer something that is designed for stylus input over finger input like an iPad for instance. While the software available for the iPad is very impressive, drawing with my finger isn't my cup of tea, even though I've had good results with some drawing apps on my iPod Touch.If anyone's interested in what I've done, please check out my art blog:Pierre's PortfolioI'm also interested in creating my own apps using Google's app making software and was wondering if some of the lower spec'd devices might still be good for this purpose.Frankly, I'm not that interested in making a huge financial investment and thought the Eken m001 looked interesting, especially in light of all the interesting custom firmware updates that are available here.Any thoughts and input would be greatly appreciated.Thanks!

 

[Roger Calver]

The Eken's are cheap now and still very useful with custom ROM's, the m003 is a better buy with its larger screen.Also not much more in price would be the 256mg epad or the more powerful CPU of Rockchip in the aPad, the only issue with apads are they run android 1.5 but again custom ROM's come in good here.After that the price goes up but so do the specs, its a choice you need to decide before hand.And welcome to Slatedroid

 

[pfontaine2]

Hi Roger,Thanks for the information.For better or worse, I've gone and ordered the Eken M001 and look forward to playing around with the various firmware updates. I'm intrigued with the idea of playing around with Android, as well as seeing if WinCe is a viable alternative.I thought about the M003 but it seems that the hardware behind the tablet was similar to the M001, all the while trying to drive a larger screen. There seems to be much more active development of custom firmware updates for the M001, so I think this will keep me nice and busy for awhile.I've always liked tinkering with electronics and I'm interested in the idea of a digital sketchpad. I've modded my EeePc 701 with a touch screen already and have fooled around with other devices that allow me to draw on the go.Thanks again and I look forward to delving into this forum as the following days and weeks go by.Pierre

 

[Mike]

Urghh I wish I'd seen this earlier. M001 = Bad choice for Digital Painting / Drawing. The accuracy of the digitizer is awful - holding the stylus down in a single spot will still result in the actual input jumping everywhere within in a 1mm radius. I'm just going to test out drawing on my Nationite tablet - I'll report back in a second.

 

[Roger Calver]

The touchscreen is a lot better now with the 1.9.0 & 1.9.1 FW, one hell of an improvement over the 1.7.4 drivers.Still not fantastic but if you run the config with a stylus its a lot more precise.

 

[Mike]

Ever since my digitizer broke I have not updated it :s Good to know though. I wasn't actually able to get Doodledroid running on my Nationite - I might try with an older version sometime.

 

[pfontaine2]

Hmmm...I'm sorry to hear that the M001 running Android might not be up to task as a digital sketchbook. There's always Windows CE, though I don't know what software might be out there.Regardless, I knew going into this that the M001 was not going to be the answer to my quest but at the least an interesting diversion. Frankly, I purchased a Nintendo DSi, specifically for the purpose of running the homebrew app "Colors", as well as they DSiWare program called "Art Academy", which has a very nice free-paint mode. I'm also looking forward to "Inchworm", which is an animation and paint app to be released soon on DSiWare. It's a great platform for drawing and painting, but I still like to tinker with this stuff and I'm always trying to learn something new!Pierre