Rooting and installing Gapps on Coby 1042 tablet from Linux/OSX

Vacation time is great!

I went into Fry’s today and found they have the Coby 1042 (10.1″, Android 4.0.3) on sale. Normally I don’t pay much attention to the lower end tablets because they miss one or more features I think are pretty critical in a tablet:

• Capacitive display
• Fast CPUs
• SD card slots
• Ice Cream Sandwich
• The ability to easily mod/root/extend

The Coby device, however, meets all of these requirements!
And it comes with an HDMI port, full USB port to attach a keyboard and mouse, and a nice soft neoprene sleeve too.

Rooting

Requirements

• Install the Android SDK to get the adb binary
• Download and decompress coby_root3.zip(I have a backup copy if this link stops working)

Rooting the device is beyond trivial.
In the coby_root3 directory is a data directory, which you need to push to your device and then run a few

adb

commands::

$> cd coby_root3
$> adb push data /data/local/tmp
$> adb shell chmod 0777 /data/local/tmp/mempodroid
$> adb shell /data/local/tmp/mempodroid 0xd7cc 0xad27 sh /data/local/tmp/root.sh

Congratulations! You now have root, and the Superuser app is installed!

Installing Google apps

I tried a variety of things to get Gapps working, most of which just didn’t work. I did manage to get things working with this relatively simple process though.

Go to http://goo.im/gapps/ and download and decompress the gapps-ics-20120429-signed.zip file.
Now copy all of the apk files in there to your tablet:

$> cd gapps-ics-20120429-signed
$> adb push system/app /data/local/tmp
$> adb shell 
adb> su -
adb> mount -o remount,rw /system
adb> busybox cp /data/local/tmp/app/* /system/app
adb> exit

Reboot the tablet.

This was enough to get the Google Play store working and I could install Gmail and other apps.

If you have problems, shoot a message and I’ll be happy to try and help.