I received a nice surprise on Friday afternoon. The Froyo build for my TEGA v2 tablet was finally available for download as part of Tegatech’s public Beta program – something I’d been waiting for ever since I first received the tablet!
A quick crash course on the TEGA v2: it’s a 10.1-inch tablet that dual-boots Windows 7 Home Premium and Android. Initially, it was shipping with Android 1.6, and it’s the same hardware as the Viewsonic ViewPad 10, with a 1024 x 600 resolution capacitive display, 3G and 802.11n Wi-Fi, 1.6GHz Intel Atom N455 processor, 2GB of RAM, two USB ports, a microSD slot, a 32GB SSD and a mini-VGA port.
The dual-booting functionality with Windows takes it out of the league of a simple ‘play’ tool and turns it into something you could use as your everyday computer. Boot into Windows when you want to do “serious” work with Microsoft Word, Excel, and other Windows apps, complete with two working USB ports that you can use for an external keyboard, mouse, flash and external hard drives, etc, and then swap over to Android when you want to have some fun and need a simple instant-on tablet with lots of cool apps and games.
Upgrading my TEGA v2 was a cinch. The Beta is being distributed as an ISO, but I didn’t even need an external DVD drive to run it – I just followed the dual-boot manual at the bottom of this page and used it for turning a microSD card into a bootable USB drive. I just needed to go and get myself a USB keyboard to enter the boot prompts (the touchscreen isn’t recognised until you get to the operating system layer) – all of the ones that I had in the house are wireless! One of the bugs that the Tegatech team made us aware of up-front was that earlier versions of the TEGA (ie v2 rather than v2.1) wouldn’t be able to connect to Wi-Fi, and needed an updated Wi-Fi card to use this functionality. Hugo (the principal of Tegatech), being the absolute champ that he is, promised to courier a new Wi-Fi card over to me on Monday so I could upgrade the card myself.
In the mean time, turns out that 3G doesn’t work either. I tried a few different SIM cards on different networks, but I couldn’t get the 3G data working. It’s not a huge deal for me, given that I’d probably just use the Wi-Fi at home to connect, and the Wi-Fi hotspot feature on one of my phones to get Internet access out of the house, but of course I’ll need to get my Wi-Fi working first! Still, first impressions of Android 2.2.1 on the TEGA are very positive! It’s still early days yet, and as part of the Beta program, it’s understood that there will be bugs here and there, but nevertheless I’m pretty excited about being able to run Froyo on this tablet – I have a feeling I’ll be using it a lot more often once I get the Wi-Fi card upgraded! iPad 2, eat your heart out! 
