I stopped system updates using this
That should also keep a bit of a lid on data usage.
There is a whole pile of features which Samsung removed from standard Android 4.4.2…
I am pleased to say the Android app shop is as full of crap as any other app shop. Perhaps 80% of the potentially really useful apps (like those for setting up file associations – how the hell can one map a .map file to Oziexplorer??) simply don’t work. And most of the rest have amazing functionality, like telling you that after Monday comes Tuesday… Paypal refuses to authorise app purchases (after 1 day) due to “high risk” so I have to stick to free apps. Chrome is a piece of crap compared to the PC version – you can’t even change the order of the bookmarks, so I went to Firefox. Lots of fun 
Edit: There may be a way to get a connection to a phone without using bluetooth or wifi, if the phone can emulate a modem via USB (all the Nokias can, for example). Then the PPP app (mentioned earlier) can connect using the usual ATDT*99#. The price for this is having to use a USB cable, which is OK. I will report if I succeed.
I have just put a matt filter on the screen and the result is about the same as any other tablet e.g. the Ipad. Perfectly OK, marginal in sunlight.
The external NMEA GPS (an ancient EMTAC bluetooth one) works great with Oziexplorer but no other app sees it (they all use the internal one). This is impossible on any IOS device which need the special IOS-compatible external GPSs, none of which AFAIK supports both external antenna and external power.
PPP Widget doesn’t work on this device. The developer replies via a forum where I started a thread but it’s a long process, extracting info one little bit at a time. I can’t understand why people cannot just reply to a straight question.
I wonder if Samsung have crippled the Galaxy to not work as a USB host (i.e. with a USB OTG cable). OTOH, it does seem to detect the cable being plugged in, and since an OTG cable is the only cable whose mere presence can be detected (because it has pins 4+5 shorted), it looks like it does have support for Host mode.
I’ve also been talking to FTDI (Prolific – China – offer no support) and pointed out that their terminal app which is on their website as .apk is evidently much more recent than the one in the app shop. Also the one in the app shop loads as soon as the FTDI cable is inserted, which obviously prevents any other serial app using the virtual COM port The terminal app on their website however does not thus auto-load… It’s a real mess, with lots of developers having written something for v2 or v3 and then it stops working on v4 and they never notice but keep selling the app via the shop. No wonder many of the shop apps show 500,000 downloads. 490,000 of them were uninstalled minutes later.
You could always capitulate and have an ipad with Skydemon, Jeppeson, and Memory Map on it, and get a GTN750 and link the ipad to that. If you put a cost to your time I would be much cheaper.
That will get me two things:
This is one
and I still won’t have satellite data unless I spend yet more money on one of two other products – and ADL120 or the Thuraya Satsleeve.
It also won’t get me a device on which I can run maps of my own, or obtained from “nonstandard” sources. I don’t think there is a moving map app for IOS which is any good. There are several Oziexplorer-like apps but they are all crippled when it comes to projection options.
I do capitulate but usually not immediately. Unfortunately it’s a fact of life in today’s “instant satisfaction” scene that as soon as you get off the beaten track you are quickly into unexplored territory. I do have a solution (the Lenovo tablet) so I have time to play with…
There is a whole pile of features which Samsung removed from standard Android 4.4.2…
Another avenue worth exploring would be to replace the Samsung ROM with a stock Android one. You’ve rooted the tablet anyway so there is no reason to accept any limitations introduced by Samsung. My Moto G smartphone has an almost standard Android version and it’s a joy to use. Much better than any ‘manufacturer enhanced’ versions I have ever seen.
Look into http://www.cyanogenmod.org/ that’s the premier non device supplier Android distro which does everything they never wanted you to be able to do.
Won’t that wipe out all my app config?
I am actually not sure if this tablet supports USB Host Mode at all. It detects the OTG cable so it looks like it should. There is a Host Mode bridge cable which I have and which works with an FTDI terminal app, but it doesn’t create a ttyUSB file so apparently there is no VCP functionality, and the terminal app uses some other API.
So this may not solve anything.
Won’t that wipe out all my app config?
Yes, loading a new ROM is similar to installing a fresh copy of Windows on a desktop pc. You’ll have to install any apps again from scratch. But the stock ROM won’t have any of the limitations that Samsung may have added for whatever reason.
Luckily there is yet another app that checks whether USB host mode is supported on a device.
If you down the road of rooting etc. then you best start with CyanogenMod. That’s the distro for these things, gives a lot more options in a well organized way with package manager, etc. Otherwise you will keep on running into issues due to the changes Samsung made.
The main difficulty with Android is that hardware manufacturers modify it and them being hardware manufacturers, they don’t have the slightest clue about software development. Personally, I solved this by buying the Google branded Nexus devices but as of the latest generation, they are not that attractive anymore from a price/performance ratio. My next one is going to be something else with CyanogenMod.
I have made progress.
There appears to be no way to get a ttyUSB device file under /dev, using anything from FTDI. I have spoken to them, because we buy thousands of their chips for our USB-RS422/485 converters and getting this to work would be good because we could advertise Android capability, which nobody else has. They say it cannot be done without recompiling the kernel and they have a long appnote on how to do this.
However Prolific’s PL2303HX (emphasise the HX; the old PL2303 used in 99% of cheap USB-RS232 cables is not HX) does do that, via a normal OTG cable. I now see ttyUSB0 under /dev, using the root file browser.
I configured PPP Widget for ttyUSB0 but it doesn’t find the modem. Post-reboot, it sits there indefinitely, saying “checking access” with both buttons greyed out. I am trying to find out what it is doing…
If I connect a scope to the RS232 connector, and start up the Prolific dumb terminal app, I can see characters coming out, and if I loopback pins 2 and 3, I see the reception of the transmitted data (9600,8,n,1, handshake off). So this is MAJOR PROGRESS! A functioning VCP under Samsung Android… so much for needing to recompile the kernel!
Now I need to find out what the hell PPP Widget is trying to do… but it doesn’t sound like it’s too far away.
