No Exercises in Apps
Grambers
October 17, 2011 at 10:42 AM posted in ChinesePod Mobile AppsHi there,
My wife recently returned from China laded with Lenovo's new 乐pad A1-7. I downloaded the Chinesepod mobile app but was surprised to discover that neither 'the 'exercises' nor 'grammar' sections are offered on the mobile platform. Can I ask why this is, and whether there are any plans to change this state of affairs? I also used the device to browse to the regular website and found that, presumably because of Flash functionality issues, I cannot effectively use the 'Sentence Re-ordering' and 'Dictation' sections. Any advice on this would also be appreciated.
My own advice for the community is DO NOT BUY Lenovo tablets in China in the hope of using them back home. My device is not loaded with any Google products, and is currently locked out of Android Market, meaning I can't gain access to those Google products, nor many, many, many other apps which are only made available through Android Market (one of these being Adobe Flash player). The device is also so new that there's no current way to root (or flash) the device (though it's frustrating that I should even need to consider this, given that this is a brand new product from a major IT manufacturer). What I get instead is access to Lenovo's own "app store" which has only a few hundred apps, nearly all of which are useless to the non-Chinese consumer. Sadly, this appears yet another case of a Chinese company merrily conspiring with the mainland authorities to construct a fully functioning Chinese intranet, fully insulated and protected from the big, bad World Wide Web.
Grambers
October 24, 2011 at 10:26 AM
It was actually a gift, so the decision wasn't entirely mine. However, it was my ever cost-conscious wife who picked up the booty. The equivalent US model, the IdeaPad ships imminently, and costs USD 229, making it about 30 per cent, or so, more expensive than the Chinese version (which cost exactly 1000 RMB through Lenovo's approved Taobao shop). The problems aren't as obvious as Green Dam would have been. The chief issue is being saddled with a proprietary app market which is totally useless for an overseas user. I've figured out that I can download apk files from file sharing sites, but given all I want are free apps, it feels little wrong to have to do this illegally when, if I had access to Android Market, I could do this in the blink of an eye, and to everybody's legal satisfaction!
johnb
October 18, 2011 at 03:15 AM
Hi Graham,
We plan on supporting exercises and grammar in our forthcoming Android tablet/smartphone app (as well as in the next major release of our iOS app). I can't give you an exact date, but we're working on it right now.
Grambers
October 20, 2011 at 01:35 PM
Many thanks. I look forward to downloading as and when it appears. Happy coding!
pretzellogic
October 22, 2011 at 03:47 AMNot that you're still watching this thread, but i'm curious about why you'd buy a Lenovo/Dell/HP/Asus laptop in China in the first place. I've casually looked around, and it seems that most of the laptops in China were around 5-20% more expensive in China that in the US (forgive my America-centric view if you're from another part of the planet). And the Green Dam - Youth Escort incident didn't add luster to Chinese embedded software development.