New tablet and keyboard
About a month ago, Woot had a special deal on a neat dual-screen tablet, the Entourage Pocket Edge. The Pocket Edge has a 7 inch Android tablet and a 6 inch eInk/ebook reader. The screens are hinged and fold together to the size of a medium paperback book. Makes for an interesting device. Originally, the device retailed for $200-$300. Woot had the Edge for $119.
The catch? Entourage has discontinued production of the Pocket Edge and it’s larger 10 inch dual screen counterpart, the Edge. The Pocket Edge tablet comes with Android 1.6 and can be easily updated to 2.2 using software from Entourage. Unfortunately, Entourage has closed its app store and the Pocket Edge can not use the Android App store without some major work.
One of my goals for the device was to be able to use a BlueTooth keyboard. I found a nice Acer BT keyboard: small, compact, portable. The hard part was to find a BT keyboard driver for the Pocket Edge. The Pocket Edge only supports audio BT devices. Without access to the Android Market, finding a driver that can be downloaded directly from a site was hard. The only one I found was Teksoft’s BlueInput driver. (Demos are available for a direct download from Teksoft’s web site.)
Following the instructions on the Teksoft web site, I was able to get the Acer keyboard working. This entire post was written on the Acer keyboard using the Pocket Edge. The keyboard response is a little slow, but not bad. It’s very usable. Most of the keys map properly (except for the greater than and less than symbols). Otherwise, I’m very happy with the device.