[iconoclast]

yea i see where you are coming from with the BN 'alliance'. i did read about Border disaster of a device also...

maybe youre right and pandigital will evolve these devices some more with updates. anyone try to connect it to usb and use adb on it ADB - Android Wiki and see if they can talk to it from a pc?

anyone dare flashing a g1 or other arm11 based firmware on the device yet? seems like our options are a bit more open since we can return them locally if we fry them especially now with the 'recall'. im tempted to load the sdk with emulator to mess around some but im definately not versed in rooting and hacking android. hoping one of the eken m001 rommers jumps the wagon here.

When it's booted normally adb won't see it. If you catch it in recovery mode adb will acknowledge it, but in recovery mode you'll only have a limited subset of the adb commands (e.g. no shell).

The firmware upgrade process checks the digital signature on the new firmware before flashing it, so you won't get it to load an alternate firmware without rooting it first. Once it's been rooted, the possibilities are wide open.

 

[iconoclast]

Ok, something must've been out-of-whack on my system yesterday, since today adb does seem to work when the device is up and running. The bad news is they've changed a few things around from the standard android, so many of the existing tools floating around for poking at android phones aren't going to work out of the box.

The recovery images have different headers, they seem to have a different process for flashing them from the update scripts, the partition layout is different, etc. They seem to have chosen some odd wheels to reinvent. Which just might be part of why some of the "standard" android features (market comes to mind) aren't debugged and ready yet, but promised for a possible future release?

I expect it won't be long before we're seeing custom roms from those with the talent to make such things, but figuring out some of the non-standard changes in the novel might just slow that process down by a couple hours.

 

[iconoclast]

Ok, slight adb update. When everything's running normally, no adb response. When I was poking around in the adb shell on the device yesterday, logcat was showing some errors from surfaceflinger not being able to access a particular file, etc. It seems that under certain error conditions, it kicks on usb-debugging and thus adb starts working. The firmware also seems to be labeled as an engineering/test release, so there's no telling if this behavior will be the same or not after the recall/reload/re-release cycle.

Maybe this all just means that we'll have a rooted rom available by the time the devices reach the general public.

On one hand, if the black model is out soon I'll be bummed for having jumped on this one so quickly. On the other hand, I'd rather have a white one in my hands now than none at all.