A few weeks ago just after Halloween, Walmart had a “Saturday Only” sale. One of the things they had on this sale was a Vizio VTAB1008 8″ Android tablet. We figured it looked like a good deal for $198 (regular $248). So we bought two of them, one for my wife, and one for the rest of us.
As I had planned to start up a side business developing software for Google’s Android platform it was easy to justify the second tablet.
For the price, the graphics and sound on this beast is fantastic. Most of the shortcomings can be fixed with either replacement software from the Android Market, or system updates to the Linux OS once the tablet has been rooted. Over the next few weeks/months, I’ll be cataloging all the steps taken to bring this tablet to its full potential, improving shortcomings and adding features that are missing but should have, in my opinion, been included as stock features.
When we purchased our tablets, there hadn’t been a confirmed way to root them. The only thing I had found online was a brief mention that a pre-released tablet had been successfully rooted with the Gingerbreak package. Unfortunately, this didn’t work on the tablets we had purchased. So, I’ve had to wait for someone more knowledgable in these matters than me to figure out how to root it.
More updates to this project will be posted soon, so check back next week.