A long time ago my daughter gave me a samsung 10.1 GT7510 tablet, which I happily used for a few years, after adding firefox as a browser. I stopped using it when it started acting up and being slow.
Having recovered it from the drawer I put it in it was completely flat. The battery successfully recharged and seems fine, all the downloaded apps and photos had disappeared and the thing had reverted to factory settings with a date of Jan 2004.
It is android 4 and the stock browser won't render many websites.
Has anyone upgraded such a beast? I see dire warnings about turning it into a brick. It seems one must first root it then upgrade the android OS.
It will only be used for browsing the net, I was going to lend it to a lady who has no internet at present.
As she has no email address I see a problem downloading apps but if push comes to shove I can get her a gmail account, she is rather paranoid about her privacy.
My thoughts are it was a nice little device but might as well bite the bullet to make it more usable.
A device that started out running android 4, is likely to be treacle when running anything newer, seems you can get TWRP bootloader (used to wipe it and load the firmware) and android 7.2 for it, apparently it breaks the camera
loading custom firmware on android devices can be pretty fraught at the best of times, for a device this old everyone who did it years ago will have forgotten the wrinkles and workarounds they used.
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looks like the original files deleted, but saved by someone else
That's interesting in that it has an Nvidia Tegra processor - they're a bit harder to work with than other vendors. That may limit options somewhat.
It seems there are various third party ROMs up to Android 8:
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you would have to dig into the threads to see how well they work. It's not uncommon for some things to be broken, although maybe those are things you don't care about (NFC, Bluetooth, that sort of thing)
The usual process is:
Install a 'custom recovery', the common one is called TWRP.
formatting link
The way you do this is with a USB connection and Windows tool called 'Odin'
- this download site worked for me:
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a video on using Odin - this is the only really dangerous step)
Then you need a .zip containing a ROM image, downloaded from XDA or elsewhere. Simplest is to put it on an SD card if you can do that (there are other ways if there's no SD slot)
Once TWRP is installed, you reboot the phone into it. Usually you hold down 2-3 buttons, eg power+home+volume-up and you get a menu. Often you navigate via the volume buttons, not the touch screen.
Using the menu you wipe the phone and install the zip
Optionally you also install the Google Apps by downloading from here:
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installing that zip via TWRP in the same way
Then you power cycle the phone and hope for the best! With luck it'll boot into your new OS where you can set it up
This guide shows the steps (although using Heimdall on Linux not Odin on Windows) and links to the downloads:
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you need an unofficial TWRP as mainline TWRP doesn't support it)
If things go wrong: Assuming you managed to install TWRP correctly, you can always wipe the phone and install a new OS. The second line of backup is that you can use Odin to reflash the stock firmware, which can be downloaded from here:
formatting link
you're back to how it was out of the box.
You would need a Google account to access the Play Store, so that gets you an email address as well.
(There are other ways to download apps that avoid Google's spying, but not very useful friendly ones)
Worth a try. Be aware that it's slower than modern devices, so you may find it's less responsive with a newer OS.
The alternative would be to find a browser that works on the current OS - maybe some of them do.
Depends on how much your time is worth but you can get a 10" tablet for around £100 (or less) which is likely to be far more usable than a really old one running a really old OS.
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Not recommending Argos, just a quick example of what is on offer.
I suspect that you are in for a world of hurt if you try to revive the old Samsung. Not the experience a technology shy older lady might relish. Noting that the MiFi seems a good idea. Not many UK tablets seem to have SIM slots.
I rooted a NOOK HD+, using a ready rolled for it set of firmware. I needed to run some Android software and the NOOK was all I had available to run it on. It's sluggish, but usuable.
Depends whether you are allowed to get a copy of the newest Android you can and then find out the best software versions to run on it. Might be a little slow and if you say its acting up might have touch screen issues, the early ones did, so as others suggest, might be best for her to get an Amazon Fire tablet which are very good value for money. Brian
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