Upgrading a Rogers Galaxy Tab 7 to CM9 (ICS)

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It’s really hard to find info on these original 7″ GSM Galaxy Tabs from Rogers. It’s even harder trying to do advanced things like rooting/unlocking/changing bootloaders, flashing, etc. If you’ve had your eye on that alpha build of ICS, you’re headed for a ton of pain in getting information for it, so I thought I’d put up how I got it done. If you’re a super nerd, it’s totally worth it. If you’re a regular joe, it’s too much pain for the gain for now, and I’d wait. There’s got to be easier ways, but I thought I’d document my madness anyways. I’m assuming you’ve used Samsung’s Kies to upgrade your Galaxy Tab to Gingerbread and that you have no problem totally ruining your warranty and potentially bricking your device. Again, probably easier ways out there to do this, but it worked for me. If/once there’s an easier way to get Clockworkmod recovery on the Galaxy Tab, I’d imagine these steps could be chopped in half. This guide will likely work with Galaxy Tabs from Bell, Virgin Mobile, etc. I’ve structured my howto below as a high level guide and have omitted some details. If you can’t get past a step, Google it.

Download: Superoneclick 2.3.3, Samsung phone driver pack, Overcome GB Stock Safe v5, Overcome 7 Series v4.1 Wipe ROM, Overcome Kernel v4.0.0, heimdall suite 1.3.1, Odin 1.7, and the newest rom, kernel, and Google apps pack from HumberOS. Some files available from XDA forum, others from TeamOvercome, others you have to find.

  1. Download SuperOneClick, set your tab to USB debugging mode, and click some buttons to get root. This might not be necessary, but it’s easy enough.
  2. In order to get Clockworkmod recovery setup, I had to go through a bit of a convoluted process using team Overcome’s process. Start out by getting their stock ROM installed using Odin. You’ll need gt-p1000_mr.pit from the zip, as well as the modem that corresponds to your device. For more details on steps 2 to 5, see “the guide“
  3. Once you’re booted into the stock rom, you’re going to copy their new 4.1 ROM to the file root of your device using USB mass storage mode.
  4. Then you’ll start in download mode, and flash the 4.1 kernel. I had to use Heimdall, because the kernel wasn’t available as a tar file and I was too stupid to figure out how to use Odin to flash just a kernel. I was even too stupid to use Heimdall’s frontend to flash just a kernel and copied the zImage to Heimdalls directory and used the command line to move the kernel to the device. Use “heimdall flash –kernel zImage”
  5. On reboot, your device will be taken over by a devil harpy who will format your device to ext4 and do some other stuff that probably doesn’t matter.
  6. Next up, you install the 4.1 ROM from ClockworkMod recovery, then reboot. Whip through the OS setup part, it doesn’t matter.
  7. Add the 3 Humber files to your root over USB.
  8. Reboot into recovery, clear data, clear cache, clear dalvik cache, then install the ROM, Kernel, and finally gApps.
  9. Reboot, enjoy ICS.

Terminology:

“Reboot into ClockworkMod Recovery”: Depending where you’re at, you might have this as an option when you turn off your device. Otherwise, Volume Up+power until you see the Galaxy Tab logo, then let go.

Go into download mode: from device off: volume down and power until you see the android digging with a shovel.

Most features work: Bluetooth (tested with audio and the Logitech keyboard for android 3.0+), front facing camera for Skype, gsm data, chrome for android, flash, etc. Still, there’s no camera still shot, chrome crashes for me when I go into settings, and a few other apps were a bit buggy. All in all, pretty good and very close to a real released version.

Logitech Tablet Keyboard for Android 3.0+ Review

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Logitech Tablet Keyboard Box

Logitech Tablet Keyboard Box

One of the major holes with the whole “use a tablet instead of a computer” philosophy is that software keyboards SUCK compared to old fashioned, hardware keyboards. It’s just really tough to beat that tactile feel of a key, plus all those years or decades of keyboard practice you’ve built up.To make up for the loss, many manufacturers are building Bluetooth keyboards for Android tablets and iPads. Some come as part of a case or sleeve, while others leave your tablet alone. The Logitech Tablet Keyboard is a bit of both, offering a Bluetooth keyboard and a keyboard case that doubles as a tablet stand. At $70, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Setup
Setup itself was as easy as I imagined it would be. I had to pull two well labelled tabs to engage the batteries, flip the on switch, search for bluetooth devices on my Galaxy Tab 10.1, select the keyboard, and punch in a numerical value on the keyboard. That sounds like a lot, but I can assure you it took less than a minute. Turning the keyboard off then on again results in the tablet quickly re-pairing with the keyboard automatically as expected.

The Keyboard
I LOVE typing with this keyboard. It’s thin, but the keys are well spaced out and I found it a breeze to hit some really good typing speeds. I always thought of tablets and phones as slow input devices, but this keyboard has shown me the way. I have a Dell mini10 netbook next to me, and that keyboard SUCKS compared to this one. Where the Dell’s keys are cramped and flush mounted, these keys stick out and have some space between them. Striking depth on the actual keys is reduced compared to a regular keyboard, but I don’t really miss it.

In Use
Actual use of a tablet keyboard like this should be limited for most people. A tablet is afterall, a device of convenience designed for maximum portability. Lugging around even a sleek keyboard like this one is not really what they’re intended for. But for the times when you need to crack out a lengthy email, or a blog post like this one, it’s unbeatable. The real reason I bought this tablet was to see if it was possible to get rid of the Dell Netbook. The netbook provided some great portability, and when it came to content creation, it still beat the pants off the tablet. With this keyboard, that’s no more. With a few other peripherals like the USB host and SD card adapter, this tablet should handily take the place of a laptop or desktop for most home users.

Knocks
1. The keyboard comes powered by AAA batteries, and I see that as a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because in 3-4 years when a built-in battery would be starting to die, this keyboard can still be running strong on fresh, off-the-shelf AAA batteries. A curse, because I can’t imagine AAA’s would last longer than a well integrated rechargable lithium battery pack.
2. The keyboard does not lock into the keyboard case, it just kind of hangs out in there. It trades convenience for a really sure lock on the keyboard.
3. The keyboard comes with some extra functions like media starting, home, browser, etc. Like the extra function keys on my regular keyboard, they will never ever be used. The keys are only ever hit by accident, and I’m almost always pissed off when I do. My keyboard at work in particular, has a sleep button placed right over the arrow keys. A great example of why I hate them. In any case, the function keys on this keyboard are mostly kept out of the way by use of an Fn button, but there’s still the home and back buttons that camp out right next to the space keys. Time will tell whether these are useless or despised.

I think that’s about it. I haven’t had a chance to play with a lot of tablet keyboards, but if they’re all like this, wow. I used the Logitech Tablet Keyboard to type out this post, and it worked like a hot damn. I think that netbook’s days are numbered.

Optimize Your Blog for SEO

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Yeah yeah, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and I already said “Optimize” in the title. . .you got me. But read on and you’ll understand why I chose such a seemingly poor title.

Just to start out: this blog does not really kick ass. I started this blog on February 8th of 2011 as an experiment and to share where I hadn’t found the right information online. I’ve used some out of the box thinking on blog traction, and I’ve seen enough sample results to help you with some strategies and tactics on getting content that sticks better.

Early on in the blog, I used a bit of social media to drive traffic to the blog, but since have relied mostly on using topics and content that appeals to people out there searching on Google and the like. Part of my very loose MO on this site is to save people time with content that doesn’t exist elsewhere on the web, and spamming my social media groups to read it didn’t seem to make much sense to me. It may make more sense for you depending on your goals. That all said, one of the cool things with building good content that people need and can find via search engines is that you get a cumulative effect on your work. Content that is interesting in a year will still get traffic and you don’t need a constant churn of wicked blog posts to keep traffic up. So long as you don’t write on topics that become outdated a week after you post them, you can build up some serious traffic to your site and keep lumping more and more traffic on top. If you keep a good amount of content coming out, you’ll see that growth in traffic even if you have absolutely no consistent readers or return visitors. That’s not to say that you don’t need them, but a constant churn of new people seeing your site will help in adding to a good community anyways.

 

The Spring and Summer were a bit flat, and that’s mostly due to a lack of writing on my part and writing the wrong things. Opinion pieces and topics that were too bleeding edge for general consumption just aren’t good topics to write on. I also expect this post to get almost no traffic, because it’s not solving any pain out there for anyone. There’s a double edged sword there: my blog now almost exclusively does single-serving problems, and as such, relies almost entirely on Google for traffic. No one comes back, because I answered their question or gave them enough info about a topic to get them going. Because of the experimental nature of this blog, and the fact that I’m way too lazy to build a community, I’m ok with that.

What Kicked Ass?

  • Writing stuff that people want and actively look for.
  • Doing a bit of keyword research on Google’s Keyword tool before writing a post to see if it was even something that had any demand. (and what kind of things people were interested in with regards to that topic)
  • Use those keywords on your post.
  • Using Microformats in posts. See that huge kick mid-way through December? That’s due to Microformats ninjitsu. Schema.org has a bajillion different microformats.
  • As much as it makes me want to barf: “Community engagement”. You want links to your site? Engage with the communities that care. Some people have had success with Twitter, others with Facebook, others (like myself) directly engaging with other bloggers via commenting. I haven’t done too much of this.
  • Adding alt text to images. Although I get more traffic from regular Google, I get a ton of impressions and a decent amount of visits from Google Images because I properly tag most images. Easy to do with WordPress or any other decent CMS.
  • Adding a YouTube Video. I didn’t do a proper before and after, but my AVX740 review that includes a very short YouTube video gets much more traffic than any other post I’ve done.

What didn’t kick ass?

  • Linking from a Youtube video back to my site. 1,027 Youtube views and only 11 came back to my site? That sucks. If you just want to push a brand, those impressions are still great.
  • Writing position or opinion pieces. With no community, no one gives a shit.

Monetization

I feel like most bloggers aren’t experimenting enough in monetizing their blogs. If you get a decent amount of traffic, there’s nothing wrong with getting a bit of coin back for your hard work. I experimented with several platforms on this site to see which had the most promise, although you should expect that your best method of monetization may differ from mine.

  • Google Adsense. Seems like blog welfare: just enough to get you by, not enough to make it really worthwhile. Unless you write for weird keywords that run in the $10+ category or get bajillions of visitors each month, it’ll be hard to turn a living with these.
  • Amazon Affiliate: This seemed to have the best promise for reviews type websites because you get a cut of any sales you drive for Amazon. I made a token amount of money from Amazon.
  • YouTube Partners: was not accepted :(
  • Direct relationships with manufacturers and other end users: still the best match of relevancy and value, but don’t sell your sweat and labor for pennies on the dollar. Set up a minimum spend and stick to it. I wouldn’t accept a banner ad for anything less than $1000, because it’s just too big of a pain in the butt to do for anything less. You should have a minimum too. Track clicks out to these guys with Google Analytics Events (using Google Analyticator on WordPress) so you know whether you’re really bringing value for your advertisers. If you are, charge them appropriately.

There you have it. Now SEO your blogs and make some money!

4 Killer Features in The New Chrome for Android

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The Chrome for Android beta was released today a few days ago and so far, it’s been a smoking release. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to other Webkit based browsers and while there’s a lot different under the hood, I wanted to show a select few of the front end features that I think rock. Keep in mind that it’s ICS Android 4.0 only, so you won’t be able to run it on your older phone unless you root it and upgrade to Cyanogenmod9 or similar.

1. Synchronized tabs with desktop. Want to keep reading a website from work at home? Just leave the tab open. You can still hibernate, and the tab is saved so that you can resume on your phone or tablet. You used to use Chrome2Phone for this, but now it’s been eclipsed.
2. Clustered link selector. That wasn’t the link you were trying to hit with your thumb? Chrome zooms in when there are a few links clustered around in one spot so that you can hit the right one
3. Synchronized bookmarks. I’ve always been a bit lazy with my bookmarks, letting them roam wild on every single computer or device I’ve had. Now they’re all totally identical. I had to do some categorization to make it work for mobile, but now I’ve got all my links in all the same places.
4. Sweet tabbed interface. On the phone, tabs are sorted vertically, while on a tablet, they’re sorted horizontally. Looks awesome, and makes it easy to switch between websites.

Knocks
Likely will never get Flash support, which comes in handy the odd time.

That’s it. The browser has a more sensible UI and with the features above, it dominates the other browsers out there. Even though it’s in beta, I’m already using it in place of the standard browser. Add it to your shortcut bar today.

 

 

 

 

Pocket Casts Android podcast manager review

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Google’s podcast manager for Android, Google Listen, was starting to get really messed up when playing podcasts over Bluetooth in my car, so I hunted around for a suitable replacement. If I wanted to go really low tech, I could use Google Reader and then download the mp3 podcasts to my Android phone. But there’s a better way. If you have an awesome data plan, you can stream using Stitcher, but I really wanted to download them to my phone over wifi so I wouldn’t stress my data plan. Pocket Casts from shiftyjelly did just that. I originally ran Pocket Casts on my Samsung Galaxy S Captivate, and recently started using it on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Requirements:

  • Must download podcasts over wifi
  • Must auto-delete old podcasts (I’ll only listen to a podcast once)
  • Must take incoming calls or other interruptions and properly handle Bluetooth control with my JVC avx740

Nice to have: auto download and retry failed podcasts in the background. The wifi reception in my office can be a bit spotty in parts, so I’d like a podcast manager to tenaciously retry failed downloads. Realistically, I can just click the download all button when in wifi range, but this is 2012 damn it! I want my $2.99 app to do all that for me!

In Use

I primarily listen to podcasts on my daily commute. Pocket Casts alerts me when a new podcast I’m subscribed to is available, and if I’m on Wi-Fi at home or work, downloads it automatically. In the car, I have to pull out my phone and start Pocket Casts. I’d rather just hit play on my deck, but whatever. Once started, it plays the podcast just fine. Calls, navigation instructions, etc interrupt the podcast being played just fine. There’s lock screen control as well as a homescreen widget. I have Pocket Casts set to auto add any new downloads to the playlist as well as to delete any that have been played. The Pocket Casts Android app handles the use case that I outlined above just fine.

Knocks Against Pocket Casts

  • The UI seems overbuilt for me. Several of the screens do almost the same thing, and I find that I don’t need 80% of the features provided. Maybe if you’re a real podcast power user, you’d appreciate some of the extra categorization and segmentation. I don’t really need it.
  • The app developers seem to be in a state of flux on whether they use the Android download manager or their in-app one. It’d be nice if this was better tested to understand which should be used.
  • For Ice Cream Sandwich, the system settings button should be used instead of the in-app gears.

Summary

Pocket Casts Android Podcast Manager Review

Reviewed by Adriel Michaud on Feb 14, 2012

An easy to use podcast manager for Android
If you’re looking for a great way to spend some time in the car and not have to listen to commercials or the same song over and over again, load up a few hours of podcasts using Pocket Casts and you’ll be set.
Rating:4