Negatives [LWN.net]

Negatives

Posted Aug 2, 2012 3:26 UTC (Thu) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498)
In reply to: Negatives by jmorris42
Parent article: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

1) It is trivial to root the device and install StickMount from the Play store.

2) A Micro-USB male to USB-A female adapter can be had for less than $2 on Amazon that allows USB connectivity for a whole bunch of devices beyond storage.

3)This is definitely a down side, but amenable with #1.

4) Making all your UI widgets smaller on higher dpi display doesn't make the device magically better. Google "Steve Jobs Finger Sharpener" to better understand the problem of small ui widgets on a touch screen device.

5) Genuine complaint, but to me it's only a deal breaker if you live in an area that has 2.4 ghz saturation.

6) There is a fully functional GPS receiver. Tethering the device to a phone works perfectly making for a fairly nice 7" Navigation tool.

7) The battery can be serviced by the end user with standard tools without destroying the device.

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Negatives

Posted Aug 2, 2012 21:20 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (7 responses)

Don't think stickmount does what you think it does. It allows an android device to mount a usb stick, it doesn't export the onboard resources as usb mass storage.

But if you root, and if the Nexus 7 does support USB OTG, yes the combo somewhat fixes complaint #2.

2.4GHz saturation is just about anywhere now. I live in little a podunk town and here in the downtown area you can see scads of access points. From home I only see three to six. Products really need a warning label when they claim to support 802.11n and don't support both bands.

Good to know about the gps, seen conflicting info online.

After seeing the iFixit teardown I feel a lot better about the disposable angle, of course it won't mean much if there aren't actually a few sellers of spare battery packs in a couple of years. Which is always a problem.

Still leaves the big ones. No SD slot and no easy way to even access the onboard memory from a Linux box. So no easy way to put content on except via wifi. Bleh. No easy way to develop alternate firmware since you can't just boot from SD. Adding an SD slot wouldn't have cost a dollar and the lack of Mass Storage is purely a software issue.

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 7, 2012 21:55 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (6 responses)

As far as Google is concerned, USB Mass Storage on Android is dead and buried. The last Nexus to have it was the Nexus 1; neither the Nexus S nor the Galaxy Nexus had it. It's useless to complain about it now.

The reason is that USB Mass Storage requires Android to unmount that storage, which plays havoc with apps trying to use that storage.

While MTP isn't a great solution (especially for Linux), QuickSSHd works for me, and adb is also an option.

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 7, 2012 22:08 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (4 responses)

> While MTP isn't a great solution (especially for Linux)...

I've noticed this as well, and I'm surprised its still a problem after this long. MTP may be a proprietary protocol, and difficult to support in general, but the code to support it on the device side in Android is presumably open-source. Couldn't that be used to implement a perfectly compatible FUSE/GVFS MTP interface specifically for Android devices?

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 7, 2012 22:24 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (2 responses)

I found these FUSE solutions, but haven't tried them:
http://code.google.com/p/mtpfs/
https://launchpad.net/mtp-fuse/

gvfs-gphoto2 may work, but I mostly found complaints about it not working.

Most of the MTP work in Linux-land seems to have been to support old MP3 players.

If I could just get rsync to work in computer-initiated mode I'd be happy, but for now I use "rsync backup for Android" to copy certain directories over to the computer.

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 7, 2012 22:45 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

I had tried both and they treated extensions as the rule and would refuse to upload a tarball since it couldn't figure out where to put it. I'm also pretty picky about my music layout and I couldn't see a way to upload a directory structure, just files which presumably get "auto sorted" (poorly). That was when it didn't time out or crash of course.

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 8, 2012 0:38 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

I just ran across this project, which looks promising:

https://github.com/hanwen/go-mtpfs

It put the (mp3/flac) files where I told it to, rather than sorting them into random subdirectories according to its own scheme, and the performance was reasonable. However, it may be a bit unstable yet; it seemed to lock up at one point while I was scanning through the camera folder with Gwenview, requiring a USB reconnect.

MTP

Posted Aug 13, 2012 9:19 UTC (Mon) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link]

If it’s any help, I put together mtpy, which is a high-level Pythonic wrapper around libmtp. mtpull is a simple example script using mtpy that I use for pulling photos off my Galaxy Nexus.

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 24, 2012 11:15 UTC (Fri) by tekNico (guest, #22) [Link]

"neither the Nexus S nor the Galaxy Nexus had USB Mass Storage" My Nexus S does have it.