Jellybean on the Excel

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Jellybean on the Excel

Postby Trashcooky » September 21st, 2012, 10:09 pm

Well, Like a few others on here I have been awaiting patiently for someone to publish a working stable JB rom for the Excel but I got a bit lustful and decided not to wait any more but to dive in feet first and see if I could break my very fine Suggsy89's ICS by trying Christian Troy's JB for allwinner A10 plus compatability zip.

These are the files I used.

CM10.zip http://api.viglink.com/api/click?format ... 2635426871

Momo9 compatability http://www.androidfilehost.com/main/All ... _1.2.0.zip

Gapps http://api.viglink.com/api/click?format ... 2635739462

I already had CWM5 installed as part of the 4.0.3 rom from Suggsy89 so I started by emptying my external SD card and then copied the 3 files above onto it.

I rebooted into recovery and selected to install zip from sd card, chose the CM10 file first and flashed that, then because so many people on the Extreme thread had done so I wiped cache - wiped dalvic cache - and wiped battery stats. Then I rebooted into recovery and flashed the Momo9 compatability.zip and rebooted the tablet.

After quite a long (unpacking ) first boot the tablet fired up into what was clearly CM10 JB.
I tried the Easter egg in the about tablet menu and got the JB screen and I could flick the jellybeans all around the screen.
The tablet was working very smoothly but without Gapps there were a lot of things I couldn't do - such as access my Google account at playstore.

The CM10 for allwinner A10 spoofs your humble Excel as a Nexus 7 - very neat lol :D
Anyway, remembering the warning from Troy and many on this forum NOT to flash Gapps unless you have a system partition of at least 300Mb, tongue in cheek, I went for it expecting the tablet to stall but this did not happen and so far everything seems to be working supremely well and very smoothly.

My storage stats now show as:
Internal storage total space 1.15 GB Apps (app data & media content) 190MB
Available 0.91 GB Total space 2.08 GB Apps (app data & media content) 123 MB Downloads 2.82 MB.

The process preserved most of my original installed apps

Then I have a virtually empty 32Gig Ext sd card ready for my videos and other files when I put them back.

I must say, that I expected to run into problems but so far I haven't had any and I am very pleased with the results.
If you want to follow my steps then do so entirely at your own risk.
I am one happy Bunny.
If it isn't broken then don't try to fix it!
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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby benjyz » September 22nd, 2012, 9:24 am

Nice :grin:
Think. I'll take the plunge and join you.
But could you please confirm if the usual stuff is working i.e. Wifi location etc.


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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby Trashcooky » September 22nd, 2012, 2:10 pm

benjyz wrote:Nice :grin:
Think. I'll take the plunge and join you.
But could you please confirm if the usual stuff is working i.e. Wifi location etc.


Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2


Well you will have to forgive the fact that this is rather fragmented and not in any particular order but I hope it answers a lot of questions.

I am continuing to use juice defender ultimate to squeeze the most out of battery life and this routinely shuts down my wifi when I don't need it however it does seem to take a little longer to wake up wifi when I want it (about 2 minutes) but this is not an issue for me pesonally.

I do like the additional options when long pressing the power button giving me the choice to Power Off, Reboot,Profile, Aeroplane mode, silent mode.

The booting animation is quite snazzy although there is a slight delay after switching on before anything seems to be happening and this did get me wondering the first time as I seemed to be staring at a dull black slightly backlit blank screen which then seemed to make the boot animations even more startling when they suddenly appeared.

I believe my boot time has improved although I am still adding apps at present which will no doubt slow it down. When selecting 'Reboot' following a long power press it takes 15 seconds to power off, a further 15 seconds to see the Cyanogen anmiated boot screen and then a further 70 seconds to fully active.

Google maps wifi based location finder spots me precisely on a bend in my road with unerving accuracy and informs me of many services in my immediate area so full marks there.

Hardware buttons all function as expected as do the software clones at the bottom left-hand of the screen.

One nice little touch I didn't expect so it surprised me a little and that is the opened apps stack which you can swipe shut from your main screen. Whenever I previously used TV catchup on ICS 4.0.4 and pressed home and then selected the stack, the opened app stack showed the TV catchup app icon. Now when I do the same thing in Jellybean, the app stack for TV catchup is not the app icon but a screenshot thumbnail of what was displaying when you exited the app. A nice touch which could almost go un-noticed.

One thing I missed which was included in Suggsy89's 4.0.3/4.0.4 package was the Google voice search, but this was easily sorted by downloading the Google voice search widget from Play and now it's icon sits again persistantly in the top left hand corner of any home screen.

I did have problems using Text to Speech with ICS which kept reporting "Google TTS has stopped working". I still get the same thing in JB but in both cases this is easily overcome by switching to Pico TTS which is available within the accesibility settings or by installing a 3rd party package like SVOX Classic TTS which sounds really good if you install the UK voices.

Although it is power hungry, I have installed Koi live wallpaper which remains as smooth as it did using ICS.

Previously in ICS I was using Dolphin HD browser but for some reason it seemed to take forever loading a page in JB - it was much faster in ICS however, I decided to take the plunge (as much as I hate Google taking over the world...) and tried Chrome which I have to say is very quick indeed.

Update notifications work well and you get the update me app included in CM10, which ironically I got an update notification for the app itself this morning.

I had usb hosting problems with OTG with ICS but this works fine with JB. I tried to host an aging Polaroid 1click 2.5" portable drive but there was insufficient power being provided from the tablet for it to be fully recognised, however it was trying as I could hear the read-head stepping in an attempt to work. However, I replace this with a usb flash drive which was recognised immediately by the ever faithful ES File Explorer which personally I find the best for me.

One slight difference in the File explorer menu is that previously my external SD card was shown as ext sd whereas now it is shown as:
/storage/sdcard1/ and the usb flash drive when connected via OTG shows as: /storage/sdcard2/ which is nice and easy. Both are easily found in defaulted Favourites with a seperate row of icons above showing home, phone(system) Dowloads and Pictures which is a better organisation than ES file Explorer managed on ICS. Of course to get access to all of these you must have superuser installed and give ES permissions.

I have retained Mobo Player as my choice for videos as I like the easy thumbslide screen touch controls for volume and brightness when watching a film.

BBC iplayer is faultless as is TV catchup (the app) but ITV player is now incompatible.
I also like the option (there are so many more available in JB) to show battery % alongside a slimline battery icon.

I am sure I will discover lots more yet but at present I can't fault it. Battery life seems very slightly less but still a good 4 hours - as I have a 5,200 MaH usb battery pack I can charge on the move anyway so this is not a problem.

These apps work as before on ICS and include:
Amazon Kindle.
Adobe reader.
Android System.
Apollo.
Battleship.
BBc iplayer.
Calculator.
Camera.
Chrome.
Clock.
Cut the rope.
DSP manager.
ES File Explorer.
Facebook (app).
Flash Player 11+
Gallery.
Gmail.
Jeannie.
Juice Defender.
Gmaps.
Medieval Empires.
Mobo Player.
Movie Studio.
News & Weather.
Play Store.
ROM Manager.
Sentinal3.
Speed Test.
Super User.
SVOX Classic.
Terminal Emulator.
Titanium Backup.
Tunein Radio.
TV Catchup.
Update Me.
Voice Search.

So far what used to work that won't now:

Used to have Asphalt 6 working with Chainfire on ICS but now I get an error message telling me Asphalt 6 is incompatible. No great loss to an old man. lol.
Great Little War game: I thought this was OK to start with but it is not compatible with JB . sory to see it go but I will stick with JB.
ITV player v1 was previously installed but I discovered it was buggy also shown as not compatible with Nexus7 on playstore.

WARNING When on JB don't install the Allwinner mod.app from play - you can download it as a spoofed Nexus 7 but if you do what I tried (to see some apps I previous viewed with ICS) and using the allwinner mod to re-spoof as a Samsung GT i9100 , when you apply the required re-boot you will end up in a boot loop.

If I discover anything else I will make another post in this thread.

Lastly, I tested the HDMI and that works better than before as previously when on 4.0.4 I used to have to hot connect to get it working but now I can set it all up with the telly and then choose which flim to watch.

So as I said in the OP I am one happy bunny. :D
If it isn't broken then don't try to fix it!
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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby marcknuckle » September 22nd, 2012, 5:14 pm

gonna give this a go now, fingers crossed
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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby marcknuckle » September 22nd, 2012, 8:51 pm

generally seems good. just a few bugs.

apex launcher kept crashing even after uninstall and reinstall. using nova now.

when i go into the language and settings menu, settings crashes even after fixing permissions.

i will update with any other observations but so far, mostly good. cheers for the links Trashcooky
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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby Trashcooky » September 22nd, 2012, 9:24 pm

marcknuckle wrote:generally seems good. just a few bugs.

apex launcher kept crashing even after uninstall and reinstall. using nova now.

when i go into the language and settings menu, settings crashes even after fixing permissions.

i will update with any other observations but so far, mostly good. cheers for the links Trashcooky


Strange about your language settings crashing - I can enter mine fine and when I first used JB I went in and changed the language from US English to UK English.

I am using the stock launcher without problems.

I am however, finding some apps which appeared to be OK on first site are buggy - I uninstalled Great Littel War Game in the end. I did use it when the wife went supermaket shopping and I stayed in the car - guess I will have to fall back on the old faithful Battleship which works just fine. Seeing as my main function with the tablet is streaming TV I am quite happy to be using the latest OS which deals with this requirement admirably.

Had to laugh when I checked my Gmail I found a message from the Google android team saying Welcome to Nexus 7 :lol:
In my Google Playstore account I now have a nice coloured icon showing a Nexus 7 alongside all those other unknown Scroll Excel ones and the Samsung Galaxy i19000 which ICS spoofed. According to Google I now have 8 android tablets - not bad for 1 Excel. :lol:

Just for the record:

Antutu = 2985
Quadrant = 1727

These performance scores are similar to what I achieved on ICS but no surprises there I suppose as the hardware is just the same.
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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby benjyz » September 23rd, 2012, 9:47 am

@Trashcooky thanks for the very quick and informative reply. Just gonna do a backup and then dive in. Fingers crossed :smile:

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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby Trashcooky » September 23rd, 2012, 5:46 pm

WARNING:

I have edited my post a few above but thought it best to post seperately as a fresh warning that whilst on JB do not try to use the allwinner-mod.app which allows you to temporarily change your devices fingerprint, which is handy for downloading certain apps which would otherwise be shown as incompatible.

I already had ITV player installed and working on ICS but it was rather flakey on JB and I thought there might be an update, or perhaps my version was corrupted but Playstore says ITV player is not compatible with Nexus 7 so I tried using allwinner-mod to temporarily spoof my Excel back to a Samsung GT i9100.

Upon the required reboot to implement the changes CM10 bootlooped.
Thank goodness for CWM5 - a quick startup on the menu and power keys and I was able to restore yesterdays image.
Just goes to show how important back-ups are as without these belt and braces I would have been stuffed, or at least needed to flash another rom using livesuite.
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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby loebus » September 23rd, 2012, 8:50 pm

Trying this out on the damaged Scroll Excel - working well so far!

Changing language from US to UK English - no problem.
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Re: Jellybean on the Excel

Postby Trashcooky » September 23rd, 2012, 9:22 pm

Just another bit of information about using JB on the Excel.
When you log in to your Google Play account for the first time using JB it will take 24 hours or so for the Google severs to update your device to a Nexus 7. When this has happened you will receive an email on your Gmail acount from the android team welcoming you to the Nexus 7.

Using the links in this email you can explore some of the benefits of JB and also avail yourself of some free software.
Now don't get too excited, usually free means crap and in this case it is HD crap.
Asus and Gameloft have produced a free 6 app package which you can get from the Gameloft servers.
These are all basically the same type of game where you have to create a variety of families and cartoon styled animals and keep them happy. You need resources which are earned over time or you can buy them using your phone or paypal account.

Basically - imho - these are a moronic collection of one game engine app with 6 different skins being a cross between the sort of app you would expect to find on facebook and that old craze of tamagochi where if you ignore your pet it dies.

In my opinion these Nexus 7 freebies are not even worth bothering to download - but if you do here is a tip.
Gameloft are renowned for making apps which require huge amounts of data storage which (in my personal experience) never get deleted even following a game cache wipe and a full uninstall. NOVA 2 for example requires a 428 Mb download following initial installation and this data remains behind even after you have uninstalled the app.

So if you have uninstalled any Gameloft app - providing you have Super User installed - browse to /sdcard/gameloft/games/ inside here (this is the internal nand sd partition) you will find the data for all your Gameloft games. Simply delete the remaining data belonging to the Gameloft games that you have uninstalled (usually easily identifiable by their folder names) to retrieve hundreds of Mb of space. :D
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