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
adbbinary - 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.
Leave a Reply