So I bought a crazy 7″ Windows CE netbook from ebay just for something to hack around with. One day I came across this recovery image which can re-write your netbook’s flash to boot Android OS 1.6.
Well I just had to try it out, so I did. I found in the ZIP file you can find a BMP which is used as the boot screen. Well I just had to try changing that.
I noticed that this netbook, although it reported a 600Mhz ARM processor in Windows CE, actually seemed much slower, and System Panel wasn’t showing a CPU speed. Hmm, let’s cat /proc/cpuinfo:
And in the above photo you can see that my HTC Dream gets over twice the rating in bogomips than the Chinese Netbook does. So in the end, it’s kind-of cool to play with, but it can’t even run a NES emulator at an acceptable speed. It’s pretty damn slow. But web browsing, checking email and other tasks are bearable.
Some things have changed about the interface. Most notably you get a mouse cursor with this version. As well, they opted to make the notification area twice as tall as usual and have thus caused the default icons to scale in ugly ways. They’ve also added a speaker up and down icon that look fairly amateur. And there’s a bunch of horizontal bars which represent the menu button. You can also get to menus by right-clicking. The back button is the Esc key. And to get straight to home you click the house.
All-in-all, it’s pretty useless if you have a decent cell phone with you. Your cell phone can take pictures, make calls, use the GPS for geo-location, use an accelerometer for games or use bluetooth. This netbook with Android has web browsing and email. It can barely run anything else. Oh music… you can do that too. Oh well.
