Coby Kyros 7120-4G

[velazquez]

I apologize for putting this here, but there wasn't a section for the tablet I just recently purchased. So Mods, please put this posting where appropriate. Now on to my question.

I am new to the world of tablets and this particular model. What I am hoping to do is utilize my BlackBerry Bold 9780 as a wireless modem for which I would need bluetooth drivers. I haven't been able to find any information, drivers, etc., about this particular tablet on Coby. Is it possible to get bluetooth drivers other than a bluetooth keyboard for this device? Also, my unit shows me I can install a system update either from the SD card or NAND storage, but there isn't anything on either. How can I go about obtaining it?

I contacted Coby and was told this is a relatively new device for them so that is why there isn't information on their website.

Android version 2 3 3
Kernel Version 2 635 7-tcc
Build Number MID7120-Mon Sep 5 11_32_59 CST 2011

 

[magentawave]

They are selling the Coby Kyros MID-7120-4G 7-Inch Android Tablet on Groupon right now for only $112.00. Coby Kyros Tablet from BTV America Deal of the Day | Groupon Chicago

Did you find the right forum for this tablet yet? Have you figured out how to play Netflix movies on it yet? Just asking cuz I'm thinking of buying one of these.

Thanks

Steve

 

[writer1211]

I just started a 7120 forum (I think). There's very little info online about this model. There's also a 7125 and I don't know the difference. Might be the size of miniSD card it takes or something like that. There's only 256K of memory and I'm a little concerned about that. Otherwise, appears to be a good, mid-level tablet running Gingerbread. Bought one today with Groupon. Great price.

 

[magentawave]

Hmmm, I thought it had 512kb? I just looked at the reviews at Amazon and while the majority give it 5 Stars there is still about 20% that give it 1 Star - mostly due to short battery life, etc.

Do you know if rooting this makes it a much better tablet?

Do you have a link to the 7120 forum you started?

Thanks
Steve

 

[bigmacg4]

Yes I would also like a link to the 7120 forum. I bought one of these with the groupon and want to be able to watch netflix with it, and get to the android marketplace.

 

[writer1211]

I'm the guy who said he started a 7120 forum. Don't think I really did. Might have set up a 7120 thread. I'm new to the system and don't have a good handle on it yet.

Those interested, let's send a message to the moderators to open a forum for us and make sure it's done correctly. Or, if there is a 7120 thread, maybe that will suffice.

Talked with customer support this am. Said the 7120 is a new model and had only sketchy info. No downloadable manual yet but it's probably coming. (Coby site lists a 7125 which has a 1 mHz processor.)

 

[surfrescue]

I just wanted to give an update on this Kyros MID7120 tablet i got.

i purchased one a week ago for $110 . so here is my rundown
First off its now available on amazon for $99

it does support 32gig MicroSD cards i have used a clas 10 card in it and it did read it, but seems happier and faster with a class 6 16gig i had laying around.

touch screen is very "technique" sensitive, if you have ever used an ipad or smart phone, the sensitivity of the touch screen will leave you cold.

the touch keyboard that comes up is TINY, so i am working on getting the swiftkey keyboard working with it.

It does NOT have access to the android market directly THIS IS A MAJOR PAIN IN THE BUT, it is just not certified by google and so far i have seen no plans for it ever to be authorized.

The market place they have running on it is VERY limited and does NOT have your favorite application......

The sreachey mole skin style case it comes with is difficult to put the device into and harder to get it out off... But i guess ists better than nothing (looking at you ipad!) and as a freebee is a bonus.

so now the good news!

it has android 2.3 loaded and supports live wallpapers! and other android 2.3 goodness, including running most apps of an Micro SD card you might install.

the 4gig built in storage is pretty generous and perfect for running apps from , while loading you larger music and video files on the option microSD card slot.

the battery life seems fairly good im getting 3-4 hours of use before i need to charge.

if you use Astro application on your Android smart phone you can backup your application to a micro SD card, then put that in your tablet and transfer the application you love to it that way.

in general for $100 that you can pick it up for its a fun toy, but a little underpowered, it does not have a fast graphics processor and the 800mhz is defiantly sub standard for todays tablets.

but for an email checker MP3player, photo viewer and MAYBE a web viewer (the screen is really a little small) it does a decent job connected to your home WIFI.

I have also found a better alternate applications store called

SlideME Market.

SlideME | Android Apps Market: Download Free & Paid Android Applications

its a littel different in that you buy the application on the web site, and credit your account first. but it works great and if the apps are free, then you can just download them right from the SlideMe market place, no hassle

also i have found an excellent application for moving you music and data across from your PC

File Expert
File Expert | SlideME

it gives windows shared folder access and also FTP access. I can highly recommend the FTP access in conjunction with FILEZILLA free ftp tool for your PC, to copy all you itunes MP3 music collection.

the best Media playback application i have found so far for the tablet is

Meridian
Meridian | SlideME

it seems able to find you music folder that you copy onto a microSD card and used all the album art etc.

apps i have managed to migrate to it so far include
adobe reader
amazon
APK Installer
Apps 2 SD
Arkanoide
ASTRO
Backgammon Free
barcode scanner (although i cant find the key that takes the picture of the barcode!!!??)
BBC News
Bible
bopokmarks to SD
Bubble Bubbles
Carnival Pinball
Check it off
Clasi Simon
Double Twist
DropBox
ebay
Engadget
Facebook
File Expert
Yahoo Finance
Google Finance
Gemini CalendarYahoo Mail
Google maps
Meridian
mixzing basic
Netflix
newegg
officesuit
opera mini
operar mobile
optionshouse
pacman
Pandora radio
Pinball
Pinball clasic
Real player
Shazam
SolitarSpider
Spider
SwiftKey X
The weather Channel
Voice Recorder
Wifi File Explorer Pro
Winamp
Wrath
Xgalaxy 2

drop me a line if you want any other details

martin_buss@yahoo.com

 

[magentawave]

Hey Martin!

Thanks for taking the time to write such an excellent review.

Have you thought about rooting it to Android?

Steve

 

[surfrescue]

I would love to but I'm a bit of a google script kiddy, and so far I have not seen any roms or instructions to root it, although the update option on this device points you to loading roms from the sd memory, so I think itpretty much designed to be rooted, if it's not already???

as soon as I see and manage to root it I will share on this info thread

 

[surfrescue]

to answer your first question about rooting...

I have rooted my android phone...samsung moment. and this did improve the phone greatly.

however... the reasons it did so was mainly because it stripped of a lot of crap sprint had pre loaded.

this tablet really is very stripped down as far as the software goes! it would be great to get a latter version ofnthe android os like version 3.0...but I don't think it will help performance. the performance issues I have are not really to do with speed. it runs pretty well even with it's measly 800mhz CPU....

what it lacks is the tegra graphics accelerator for video compression and decompression. and gameing.
and the screen sensitivity is crappy and I think that's just the way it's going to be regardless of software.

so I don't think rooting this will gain much performance as their simply is not much to take out of this device software wise!
buy as fast a class of microSD card you can class 10 is the fastest.

 

[KPrimeau]

Great info here. We have an Ipad (my wifes of course) and like the 7120 so far. Help needed. I'm having problems with the SD card. the memory is recognized in the unit but my cpu asks for me to insert a disc when I call up the drive? Any helpful hints? It also loaded 2 drives (perhaps for the onboard and the micro?) Also, cant get the netflix app to work though.

 

[surfrescue]

when you say the CPU are you talking about a pc laptop Mac?
I use a wireless connection with the application I mentioned in my review to move date to and from the unit. I did have a few problems when I put Micro SD card in the 7024 it would say damaged sd card...I found that if you take the card out putbit back in and power the unit off and on again it recognized the card just fine.

also the optional microSD card appear as a sub director called
/storage/tflash


this is the optional sd card.

my theory is that this thing has 3 memory areas.

256 of ram used to store and run apps in
4gigs of onboard sd ram that you can move apps to sd card
and the 16-32gig optional sd card tha is good for storing music video pictures etc

my experience is that memory cards and readers fail most often when inserting and removing the memory...

my advice is once it's in and reading leave it installed and use file expert to transfer data wireless. the fastest class 10card can only read and write data at 10 megs a second and a wireless network on 802.11G will send and receive at around 4 megs a second so it's still relatively fast.

 

[surfrescue]

I have downloaded a couple of books on it using the nook app, it looks great, the type is crisp, and you can chose the color setup so you can go white text on black background so it's not so bright to burn your retinas out LOL

the look of the color screen is outstanding. just wish this thing had more processing power to view videos....so far all the videos imhave tried are so slow as to be unwatchable

I have angry birds on it and it runs it's just a little stiffest occasionally but still playable.

using the es process manager defiantly help to free the system up to run angry birds a lot smother turning off background and or sound in angry bird also helps it run smoother

I did find that swiftkey x was really slowing the system down...so temporarily turning that off under language and keyboard just uptick it...

I love swift key but may need to find an alternate keyboard solution that's uses less recources

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 28, 2011, at 10:25 PM, Russ Fortson <fortsonre@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello!
*
I saw your post on Android Forum about the Coby tablet.* I'm getting one for my daughter (she's 9) to mainly use as an e-reader.* I have a rooted Nook color, but I don't want to spend that much until I know she'll like it and use it.* Also, since I've seen the Coby for about the same price as a b/w nook or kindle, I feel like the Coby (or any other similar Android tablet) is just a better deal.
*
Can you tell me if you've used the Kindle or Nook apps?* Have you used it for any reading?* How about simple games like Angry Birds?* Youtube?
*
Thanks for any feedback you can give me.*
*
Russ

 

[surfrescue]

bottom line is if I can get a color screen for $100 that lasts half a day on a charge as a reader which I believe this can....why would I want a boring old black and white screen....the web and it's documents were NOT designed in black and white. the color screen on this is outstanding. you don't have to use the stylus fingers work ok, but the accuracy on this touch screen leaves a lot to be desired so while slower then stylus will give more accurate results.

the mole skin style case while being an elastic tight fit...it does a good job of protecting the screen from scratches while transporting it in bags etc

 

[surfrescue]

once I moved angry birds from sd to system memory it ran smooth as butter

 

[writer1211]

I'm very impressed with the unit so far. Resistive screen works about the same as a capacitive screen - light pressure with a finger does the job.

Probably just my unit but I have a defect. Both the Previous and Menu keys stay lighted and are not functining. I've reset the unit several times with no effect. Might have to return for an exchange. Hope BTVDirect cooperates.

 

[surfrescue]

if you think the scren touch sensitivity works ok just wait till you have to side to scrole 50% of the time it mis registers the slide, as a press to open an application...trust me it will drive you nutts scrolling through email messages in the yahoo mail application!

 

[writer1211]

You're right, it's easy to open an app. or other when you're trying to scroll. Two things -- you can mess with the sensitivity setting and if you touch and keep your finger on the screen while you "flick" up or down the unit isn't as prone to open the item. It's a technique thing.

 

[surfrescue]

Ok this is becoming an obsession...
trying to get video to play back...and that involves more problems than i realized...and it all comes down to knowing what the hardware actually IS and what features for video decompression are built into the Silicon...

give me time and ill have this thing all wrangled out so we can root it and find a video player that will do what we need (VLC has a PRE beta version for download, not officially released, but i am going to have a play with it), and maybe given enough time tears and research i will coax Netflix into a decent frame rate.

Still Loading ... &#187; blog:2011-09-18:videolan_for_android_pre-alpha

turns out the key is this

you need
Advanced SIMD (NEON)(aka NEON or "MPE" Media Processing Engine

this is pressent in all A8 processors and optional in the A9

the MID7120 is an A6

further worthwhile reading about the video hardware acceleration

DSP & SIMD - ARM

and for information on the Micro-architecture and the features the Telechips arm11 V6 processor contains

ARMv6 ARM11 Chips:Telechips TCC8902, Infotmic IMAPX200 ,Zenithink ZT-180

this is Great INFO on the evolution of the ARM range of processors and how they comparable with each other. if you thought the Intel AMD comparisons were complicated get a load of this stuff LOL. it hard to know exactly what your getting without reading this stuff before buying a tablet/phone

ARM architecture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A nice Block Schematic of all the moduals built into this little 7 inch tablet with more specs and info

Telechips


And this is the link to all the information on NEON and what you need in an arm processor to make it blistering fast with multimedia applications

DSP & SIMD - ARM


FP

VFP (Vector Floating Point) technology is an FPU coprocessor extension to the ARM architecture. It provides low-cost single-precision and double-precision floating-point computation fully compliant with the ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985 Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. VFP provides floating-point computation suitable for a wide spectrum of applications such as PDAs, smartphones, voice compression and decompression, three-dimensional graphics and digital audio, printers, set-top boxes, and automotive applications. The VFP architecture was intended to support execution of short "vector mode" instructions but these operated on each vector element sequentially and thus did not offer the performance of true single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) vector parallelism. This vector mode was therefore removed shortly after its introduction,[26] to be replaced with the much more powerful NEON Advanced SIMD unit.
Some devices such as the ARM Cortex-A8 has a cut-down VFPLite module instead of a full VFP module, and requires roughly 10x more clock cycles per float operation.[27] Other floating-point and/or SIMD coprocessors found in ARM-based processors include FPA, FPE, iwMMXt. They provide some of the same functionality as VFP but are not opcode-compatible with it.
[edit] Advanced SIMD (NEON)

The Advanced SIMD extension (aka NEON or "MPE" Media Processing Engine) is a combined 64- and 128-bit single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instruction set that provides standardized acceleration for media and signal processing applications. NEON is included in all Cortex-A8 devices (such as the iPhone 4) but is optional in Cortex-A9 devices[28] (such as the iPhone 4S). NEON can execute MP3 audio decoding on CPUs running at 10 MHz and can run the GSM adaptive multi-rate (AMR) speech codec at no more than 13 MHz. It features a comprehensive instruction set, separate register files and independent execution hardware.[29] NEON supports 8-, 16-, 32- and 64-bit integer and single-precision (32-bit) floating-point data and operates in SIMD operations for handling audio and video processing as well as graphics and gaming processing. In NEON, the SIMD supports up to 16 operations at the same time. The NEON hardware shares the same floating-point registers as used in VFP. Devices such as the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 support 128-bit vectors but will execute with just 64-bits at a time,[27] whereas newer Cortex-A15 devices can execute 128-bits at once.

 

[surfrescue]

ok looks like if you can BACKUP your DVDs (and what ever encryption they use, with tools like DVDFAB. you can get the MPEG2 video and sound file in VOD format.

it looks liek there are no native MPG2 players that can play back VOD files,

using Slide Me application for the android you can download RockPlayer which will play back the VOD video files...but does not play the sound :-(

so the only way i can see around this so far until a decent MPeg2 video player is release, is to encode the VOB files to MPEG4 or X268 which is hardware decoded and supported by about every android media player...Rockplayer is then able to play the encoded video and audio

http://getandroidstuff.com/rockplayer-universal-android-download-v1147/



this is a very slow process even with a relatively fast dual core CPU

you can use a program called any video converter which has both a free and a pro version available that runs on windows 7.

http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/


its pretty cool in that it supports multiple threads, and you can set the number of threads and priority of the encoding in the options...and better yet supports using your NVIDIA graphics card to do the heavy lifting of encoding using CUDA.

well best of luck, just wanted to document what i found so far

best regards Martin

 

[surfrescue]

my favorite tool by far is to load File expert on the android, then run it and start the Share option and select FTP

File Expert|Best File Managing & Sharing App on Android


then load the Filezilla application on your PC or mac, and log into the androids FTP site that the file expert application hosts over the wireless connection to your home LAN (dont forget to add the port numbers file expert shows you to fillezillas FTP login info)

FileZilla - Client Download

im getting 3 megs a second over my wireless to my MicroSDcard oh by the way the directoy you want to find on your android on the 7120 is the tflash directory then the music or video foulders

 

[tekblade]

Thank you all for the awesome details on this device. I did buy one and what I hoped to use it for was to allow my son to access reading and math websites that his teacher recommends. They however run flash, and I have yet to get flash detected on any website using dolphin browser or any other browser. I have tried installing 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3 builds for arm v6 devices but no luck.

Has anyone been able to get flash installed on this tablet yet?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[surfrescue]

Thank you all for the awesome details on this device. I did buy one and what I hoped to use it for was to allow my son to access reading and math websites that his teacher recommends. They however run flash, and I have yet to get flash detected on any website using dolphin browser or any other browser. I have tried installing 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3 builds for arm v6 devices but no luck.

Has anyone been able to get flash installed on this tablet yet?

Thanks in advance for your help!

did you try opera yet? and do you have th eweb site address i can try the flash on? does it require a log on?

 

[tekblade]

I have tried the 10.2 and 10.1 with opera mobile. Is there another version of opera I should try?

Here are the websites he uses for school:
This website usually requires a login, but for the samples it does not...
Raz-Kids: Own Your Own :: Teacher Corner

I don't have the math site handy, I'll post it later.

He likes to play games at Poptropica

None of these sites recognize flash is installed from dolphin browser or opera mobile.

Thank you for your feedback

 

[MIG17]

Hello: New to the site. Myself as Velasques have the Colby Kyros MID7120. I had managed to installed the Android Market on the tablet. Works well and managed to download some apps. However here the issue that I'm running into, the Adobe Flash Media Player. I had installed the program, however when I try to either watch or play online game requiring player, it would stated "ADOBE FLASH MEDIA PLAYER" needed. Now I have try every solution that I could think of as to uninstalled it and re-install and no solution. I also try the the other Android Forum from Android Market and it seems no one has any solution or heard of such tablet.

The sad part is that I bought this tab for my niece so she could watch her Dora videos & games (she 6yrs for those who wonders lol) and unfortunately I will have to put it in the closet instead.

Not happy that the Colby website has no type of information or resources towards this tablet.

Please advice, as to beyond upset n frustrated.


Thanks
MIG