English speaker - Odys Next owner!

[Alex C.]

Hello everyone,

First of all, let me tell you a bit about myself. I recently moved to Germany (Bochum, more precisely) and unfortunately I do not understand German that much (only a few bits and pieces, Google Translate tries to do the rest, without much success ).

While browsing randomly on Amazon I saw the suggestions for the Odys Next and, attracted by the specs and the price I decided to order one, without hoping too much. Therefore, for the past 3 days I've been the proud owner of a Next .

Here comes my review and a couple of questions if there are people out there willing to give me some info in English, that would be great.

1. The UI seems a bit sluggish at some points, for example when opening the apps drawer.
2. Battery seems to hold on mine, during deep-sleep (8 hours of stand-by) no % was lost (I also used Battery Monitor to confirm). It also holds up for about 7 hours of reading, out of which 6 hours and 30 minutes the screen was turned on.
3. I've noticed that it can be easily rooted with superoneclick or just use the superuser.apk via adb (not a problem).
4. The overall performance is great, even if the kernel doesn't seem to be fully optimized.


Some questions:
1. Is the kernel released for the tablet? I'm curious if we can work something out.
2. Has anyone flashed any other ROM's on top of it?
3. Has anyone tried flashing CWM? If not, then maybe a port can be made.
4. Any other info I might have skipped?
5. Any other tweaks some of you might have performed? (changing CPU speed, etc.)

I mostly have some experience with android, mostly on xda-devs (same username, in HTC ChaCha section).

Cheers!

 

[Alex C.]

Even though I rarely double post, I thought that this could come in handy to someone.
As the screen resolution is set to 800x600, I'm not quite satisfied with the amount of viewing accessibility. Therefore, after having the Next rooted, I edited the build.prop with a new lcd.density value, 120. After that, I've increased the font size to Large from the Settings -> Display option.

As you can see from the screenshots below (the one on the left is the standard 160 density), the visibility is greatly increased, the resolution being enhanced. Now, there is a cost. Some programs can't handle the low density value and will behave in weird ways (ES File Explorer is magnified a few times for example); also I have noticed that the small menu on the home screen doesn't appear anymore now (when you press the M button, the list with Wallpaper, Manage Apps and Settings). But that doesn't bother me. As you can also see, the screen has been widened to 7 icons.
As I mostly use the tablet for reading, for me this is a great thing.

Maybe someone could put this to good use if they want.

adb remount
adb pull /system/build.prop

edit the file, change

ro.sf.lcd_density=160

to

ro.sf.lcd_density=120

save and close.

adb push build.prop /system
adb reboot

 

[renegat51]

Hi Alex,
welcome to the Next desert.

As far as I know here is nothing but root ability.

So if youre able to bring us CWM or CM10 you would enjoy us pretty well . Myself I am only a silly user of such improvement.
Greets

Sorry for my bad english.

 

[TSC Yoda]

Hey Alex.

Oma7144 made a 4.0.4-ICS ROM for most non-ICS-Tablets from Odys.
If this would increase the Next.....i´m not shure.
So its questionable to increase the performance of the Next with Cust-Roms...

For Kernel-questions ask Astralix/fr3tsOn, they are working on Kernels for Loox & co.



Regards
Markus

 

[Alex C.]

Thanks guys!

Well I've done some background checking today around the tablet after rooting it and I've notice some things that I wouldn't want to be running (like processes and apps) when my tablet doesn't need them. For example the kernel loads (through init.goldfish.sh) a few things that I personally won't use in the near future and I wouldn't want them to be up and running during start-up. One of these examples could be the rild (radio interface) which handles radio (phone) stuff (network, calling, 3g, coverage, searching, mobile data, etc.). My point of view is that this shouldn't be running while no 3G USB is connected; so it'd really like to tweak some things and hopefully get a custom ROM up and running. So from what I saw, the kernel is a standard RK2918, without any optimisations by Odys, which sucks badly. The ROM itself seems to be modified a lot and I don't really like the feel of it. (seems to sluggish). I have a CM9 ported build (not by myself) on my HTC ChaCha running on 600 MHz much faster.