Will get a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 P5110 WIFI Tablet for "free"

[Demon Cleaner]

I use a simcard in a dongle to have access on my laptop from wherever I am, mainly at work, as at a lot of sites the access is denied, so I use my laptop for accessing f.ex. gaming or emulation sites. I got a letter today from my provider that my subscription is running out this month, I pay 18.90€.

So until the 5th of July they have a special offer, if you extend your subscription for the next 24 months, with the price of 24.90€, you will get mentioned tablet for free.

Well that came quite in handy, as I wanted to extend my subscription anyway, and now I even get a tablet for free, great. Ok the subscription is 6€ more expensive per month, but that's not a lot.

[Harrison]

Nice. Is that the 10" Samsung Tab? My wife has the 7" Galaxy Tab 2 and it's a very nice and robust tablet. I'm not personally a fan of their TouchWiz interface though... much prefer the vanilla Android.

BTW, your internet access you are talking about.. Is that a 3G dongle with a data only sim in it? If so, what sort of data bandwidth do you get with that each month? Most in the UK are capped to quite low levels, which most available from 512MB to 2GB monthly bandwidth allowance. One provider THREE do offer an "all you can eat" unlimited monthly plan, but it is more expensive than others.

A friend did lend me one he had when I was moving house the 2 times last year, and that worked really well. It was with T-Mobile and was pay as you go. You could top up daily or weekly and it was reasonably fast for surfing and email, but I wouldn't want to do much more on it.

[Demon Cleaner]

Is that a 3G dongle with a data only sim in it?
Exactly that. It's kinda slow, but for surfing the internet it's quite ok. I have a 7GB download limit per month, but anyway you're not downloading movies or such with 3G, it's way to slow. The girl on the phone told me today that the highest I got so far in the last years was 1.5GB, so the 7GB is fine for me.

It's the P5110, so it's the 10" tablet, costs 260€ in the shops.

Never heard of the TouchWiz interface, I thought it was only a normal Android tablet.

Can you "jailbreak" that, or can you just use any downloaded games and apps?

I will only use the tablet in a WiFi environment at home or in hotels, like I do at the moment with my iPad. But it's good to have a second one, my girlfriend is quite iPad addicted :)

[Harrison]

TouchWiz is Samsung's front-end for android. Many developers do this. It sits on top of the main OS and adds its own look and feel, alters how some things work and adds or alters features such as their own keyboards and camera apps.

HTC and Sony among others also have their own ui front-ends. Out of them all I like Sony's the most as they don't alter the original Android os too much and instead mainly alter how the icons and interface looks.

But since Android 4.1 I've preferred the default "vanilla" Android, as found on Google's own nexus devices.

As for hacking. You can root the Samsung. That would then allow you to install different versions of android, different os kernels that are often developed to give things like better battery life or screen brightness settings.

As for actual software, you can install most apps manually without the need to root devices these days. If you can find an apk installer for the game or app then you can normally install it. The only issue would be apps that call home to verify themselves, or to download additional data to install. Often you can find patched versions of the apks to get around this though.

For android games one cool thing to keep an eye on is the Humble bundle charity site as they often have Android collections, and a really good download app.

For emulators, there are a fair few on the Google play store, some are paid for, but some are worth buying, such as the PlayStation emulator as they are the best. Many others can't be found in the main play store any more, but can easily be found on torrent sites, or other sites and manually installed via an apk.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

[Demon Cleaner]

I'm gonna read some reviews now and check the specs of the P5110, I don't know how it compares to the iPad 2. Differences between screen, GPU and CPU f.ex.

[Harrison]

You can't really compare iPad and Android devices directly due to being different OSs and hardware design. As long as an Android device as 1GB ram and at least a dual core CPU it's fine for most tasks. For the newest 4.2 then a quad core CPU and 2GB ram are recommended, but works fine with 1GB.

[Kin Hell]

I use a simcard in a dongle to have access on my laptop from wherever I am, mainly at work, as at a lot of sites the access is denied, so I use my laptop for accessing f.ex. gaming or emulation sites. I got a letter today from my provider that my subscription is running out this month, I pay 18.90€.

So until the 5th of July they have a special offer, if you extend your subscription for the next 24 months, with the price of 24.90€, you will get mentioned tablet for free.

Well that came quite in handy, as I wanted to extend my subscription anyway, and now I even get a tablet for free, great. Ok the subscription is 6€ more expensive per month, but that's not a lot.#

If it's costing you 6 Euro a month more, I guess you're paying 144 Euros over the 24 months which is around about half price of RRP. - Pretty good deal fella. :)

[Harrison]

Just wondering if you have tried this method? I don't personally use data sims or 3G dongles. Instead I tether any tablets/mobile devices to my smartphone by enabling tethering on the phone. Works perfectly for my Nexus 7. Devices see the phone is a wifi hotspot.

My mobile is on a THREE pay as you go sim. For £5 I can add an "all you can eat" internet data add-on to the phone for one month, giving me a 2GB data allowance for the month. Or if I top up the phone credit by £15 I get it includes for that month. Normally however I just top-up £10 when needed, then use £5 of that top-up for the data add-on when needed. Works really well.

[Demon Cleaner]

I don't have "flatrate" on my smartphone, as I'm only using it for sms or calls, I never use it for internet. I usually have under 10€ for the mobile phone bill, flatrates here in Luxembourg are 50€, so not worth the money. Plus I have a HTC Wildfire S phone, because I like them small, has to fit in my pocket without annoying me, that's why I also don't own one of the "bigger" phones, didn't you wonder how comes :lol:

[Harrison]

I assume flat rate is a monthly fixed rate contract over a set term of 12 to 24 months? We call them contract mobiles and they can cost from £15 a month for a basic phone, up to £45 for a state of the art phone just released. Often with the newer models you also have to pay an additional one off payment towards the phone, sometimes hundreds of pounds extra.

The other method in the UK is called pay as you go, where you get a free sim card and can put it into any mobile and top it up with credit as and when you need to use it. This is what I have. I normally top up by £10 every 45 days, which gives me the £10 credit for calls, plus free texts and some internet. I hardly ever use my mobile for actual calls so it works well for me.

[Demon Cleaner]

I assume flat rate is a monthly fixed rate contract over a set term of 12 to 24 months?
Exactly.

[Demon Cleaner]

Got it yesterday, nice little toy. To my surprise I even got the P5100 instead of the P5110, the P5100 having WiFi and 3G, and which costs 330€ at Amazon. So I made an even better deal :thumbs:

[Harrison]

Nice

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

[Demon Cleaner]

It's still running Android 4.0.3, Ice Cream Sandwich, to update to the latest Jelly Bean, I would need to root it. But I have problems finding out if my tab is factory locked or not?

EDIT: Don't get it to work, tried now for over 2 hours. The method with Odin fails, as there's no way I can make Odin recognize my tab when in download mode, it recognises it fine when in normal mode. Don't know about the Clockworkmod, information is quite sparse, so I don't dare to try it out.

Btw, I needed also some time to get the tab in USB debugging mode, as developer settings were made invisible from 4.0 on. You have to go to your settings, to the about tab, and then tap 7 times contineously on the "built" word. Then you will get the developer settings. Quite strange.

[Demon Cleaner]

Tried now connecting it at the PC at work (XP), still the same problem, Odin recognizes the tablet, but once in download mode, it doesn't find it anymore. Impossible like that to root. Didn't find another way yet.

[Harrison]

Did you force the tablet into download mode?

First load Odin.exe on the PC, but don't connect the table to the PC yet.

Restart the table and hold down the right volume up button and the power button until a yellow sign appears. When it does, press the left volume down button to enter download mode.

Only after doing this then connect it to the PC vis USB cable.

Odin should now display an "added" message and ID:com is going to be yellow. This means the device is connected successfully. If no message appears then reinstall the drivers.

Next tap the button that says RDA in Odin and search for the CF-Auto-Root.tar.md5 file on your PC (if you are using this method). Don't touch anything else in Odin, but make sure the Re-partition check box is unticked.

Now click the Start button and begin the installation. Once complete you should see a "pass" message after the tablet reboots.

If you get a FAIL message during the root update, or it freezes, open the tablet and take the battery out, and then back in to make it boot again. And try again.

[Demon Cleaner]

Did you force the tablet into download mode?

Odin recognizes the tablet, but once in download mode, it doesn't find it anymore.

Like I mentioned before, that's exactly what I'm trying to do, but I already fail with Odin recognizing my tablet in download mode.

I think download mode is, holding power + volume down, and then pressing volume up, and not the other way around like you said. Although I have no yellow sign showing up (think it also says "recovery mode", and not "download mode"). Then I get a menu where I can chose between 5 things, like rebooting, installing from external memory card aso. Then I plug it in via USB, but Odin doesn't then recognize it at all, that's where I'm stuck all the time. Drivers are installed correctly, I even installed Kies to test, and it works fine.

EDIT: Got it now, like the faqs I read, they said, power + volume down, and that's actually "recovery mode". I didn't read that it should be done the other way around, but I tried now, and I'm in "download mode" now. Gonna try to root, wish me luck!!

EDIT2: Got it rooted, have the SU app on it. Wanted to download the ROM Manager to install CyanogenMod, it also downloads the Manager, but doesn't install it. So I tried to install it from external SD card, and the verify of the file always fails "E:failed to verify whole-file signature". Tried with 2 different files, RCs.

Anyway, so far nothing changed, have SU, but still Android 4.0.3 and the evil TouchWiz.

[Demon Cleaner]

Works fine now, I just put official 4.1.2 FW on it, then rooted it and installed Clockmod recovery. I won't put now any custom FW on it, because at the moment I like it like this. I removed the widgets from the front page, added a very nice looking active wallpaper, and organized my apps a bit.

I also installed a modded Google Play Store, so I don't need to patch the games anymore with Lucky Patcher. I just installed Final Fantasy III and Chaos Rings, and they both just work fine.

Encountered another problem though whilst updating to 4.1.2, when I checked the data usage, it showed me that my tablet only has 2GB, and not 16GB. Apparently that happens sometimes. I download then a .pit file, the correct one with 16GB, and installed it via Odin, with the re-partition option checked. After that, it showed me again my 16GB.

[Harrison]

That's great that you finally got it to work. What do you think of Android 4.1?

[Demon Cleaner]

I never really used other Android devices, besides my JXD, where I think it doesn't matter at all which OS it has running, as long as it works. My HTC also has Android, but I never updated it, it's still on 2.3.5.

But it seems to work quite nice on the tablet I think.