Latest Nexbook 9P stock ROM as of Nov. 2012

[EERidenour]

Help! Little green droid with red triangle and black explanation mark!

Using the information provided by James Cozzby and Silicon Orb, I managed to get my tablet installed in Device Manager and found by ADB. I used the "Universal Serial Bus" procedure provided by James for the Device Manager and then, using the information provided by Silicon Orb, struggled through updating the Path and INI file to solve the ADB problem. So finally I was ready to try to root my tablet!!

I got my Bin4ry set up and checked my tablet settings and then clicked the RunMe file, typed 1 and pressed enter. The root process started and, when asked, I pressed restore and the tablet did its first reboot. Unfortunately, the tablet screen went black and stayed black. I waited about 10 minutes but the tablet screen stayed black. I unhooked the tablet and tried doing a reset but nothing happened. Now, when I first press the reset button the splash screen loads and, if I do nothing else, the screen goes black after 5 seconds. Sometimes, when I push the power button while the splash screen is on, a small green android appears on the screen. The android is lying on his back and has a red triangle with a black explanation mark on his chest. I am not sure what combination of button pushing and touching the screen causes the android to appear. The adroid stays on the screen for about 30 seconds and then the screen goes dark (it appears that there is a very faint background light in the screen that goes black when I first push the reset button). Also, when I plug the tablet usb cord into the computer, I get a recognition sound from my PC and the tablet shows up in Device Manager but the tablet does not make any sounds. The ADB DEVICES does not detect the tablet.

Any idea as to what I should try next?

Bruce

[Silicon Orb]

Bruce,

See my note above where I wrote "Don't panic, re-flash"

Just try the process again. Hold down the Up and Down volume buttons, press the reset button for a second, wait another second and release the volume buttons. The tablet should be dark, but when you plug in the USB, it should find an RK29 device. Use the drivers in the package to install it. Then re-flash the firmware and see what happens.

FWIW, this happened to me at least once in the process. You will need to download the stock ROM, re-flash the tablet, and try to root it again. It will probably work this time.

[EERidenour]

Success!

Thanks to the advice and guidance from Silicon Orb, reading James Cozzby past messages and reading the README file in the Finless ROM download, I managed to flash my tablet and get rid of the green droid! I really thought we were going to have a brick for a tablet! Since this is my wifes tablet, I now have to explain to her why all of the aps she downloaded and installed are all gone! Does anyone know of someway to recover the aps after the tablet has been flashed? In case I have to reflash in the future, is there an easy way to save downloaded aps?

Now I get to take another run at setting up the tablet in Device Manager and getting ADB to find the tablet and then another try at a root!

Many thanks to you guys for the help!! I honestly could not have done it alone!

Bruce

[JackTheBear]

Swipe issue with James' 4.0 rom

I got James' rom installed. Getting root was tough, I had no adb_usb.ini file at all in my .android folder on my pc, so I made one. Root issue solved, the rest of the procedure went like clockwork. Got Google Market/Play installed, but not entirely successful on the first go. It seemed to go in, but it crashed during sign in and then disappeared. I rebooted, but it didn't come back so I went into the system/app folder and clicked on vendor.apk. It installed and worked tolerably after that. I was able to sign in and download an app or two before crashing. Then it did an update, and has been flawless since. Apps that wouldn't install with Finless' rom (Angry Birds Space for example) now install fine.

The only issue I think I have is scrolling left and right (flipping through screens) is working oddly. If I swipe to go left, it goes left then bounces hard and ends up a screen right of where I started. Unless I swipe slowly and release, then it works as expected. Like it's bouncing or rebounding more than 100% on every screen. It does it up and down too, but not as bad. It just forces me to go up or down no more than 1 screen at a time. It doesn't smooth scroll and gradually decelerate to a stop. Any ideas on how to fix this?

[JamesCozzby]

That is very annoying little problem for me too

I got James' rom installed. Getting root was tough, I had no adb_usb.ini file at all in my .android folder on my pc, so I made one. Root issue solved, the rest of the procedure went like clockwork. Got Google Market/Play installed, but not entirely successful on the first go. It seemed to go in, but it crashed during sign in and then disappeared. I rebooted, but it didn't come back so I went into the system/app folder and clicked on vendor.apk. It installed and worked tolerably after that. I was able to sign in and download an app or two before crashing. Then it did an update, and has been flawless since. Apps that wouldn't install with Finless' rom (Angry Birds Space for example) now install fine.

The only issue I think I have is scrolling left and right (flipping through screens) is working oddly. If I swipe to go left, it goes left then bounces hard and ends up a screen right of where I started. Unless I swipe slowly and release, then it works as expected. Like it's bouncing or rebounding more than 100% on every screen. It does it up and down too, but not as bad. It just forces me to go up or down no more than 1 screen at a time. It doesn't smooth scroll and gradually decelerate to a stop. Any ideas on how to fix this?

This is a "feature" of this rom. i have not figured out how to change it, but i find it very annoying as well. I enjoyed the ability to "fling" the screen, but on some ICS roms, the have removed this functionality

[JamesCozzby]

Titanium backup free version

Thanks to the advice and guidance from Silicon Orb, reading James Cozzby past messages and reading the README file in the Finless ROM download, I managed to flash my tablet and get rid of the green droid! I really thought we were going to have a brick for a tablet! Since this is my wifes tablet, I now have to explain to her why all of the aps she downloaded and installed are all gone! Does anyone know of someway to recover the aps after the tablet has been flashed? In case I have to reflash in the future, is there an easy way to save downloaded aps?

Now I get to take another run at setting up the tablet in Device Manager and getting ADB to find the tablet and then another try at a root!

Many thanks to you guys for the help!! I honestly could not have done it alone!

Bruce

its a little complicated if your not sure what your doing, but titanium backup can be used to backup all applications, and restore them. but before you flash, you would have to copy the titanium folder from the nextbook, or the backups will get wiped as well. But as far as getting back the previous apps, once the tablet has been flashed, its all gone.

[EERidenour]

Google Market

My second try at rooting my tablet went fairly smoothly just like the writeup. The only problem I had was at the end with Google Market ... just like with JackTheBear. I started Market and was just completing the account signup and when I tried to send it started complaining about loss of communications and then the screen went black. Now I just get an error message "Unfortunately, Market has stopped". I get the same message when I try to run the Android Market.

It looks like I need to follow the Bear and reinstall the Vendor.apk and try to find the update for the ap.

Bruce

[Silicon Orb]

Thats now the most annoying bug i have found... I dont know why the browser crashes, or what could be a fix. I tried many, many different browsers and they all do this. I saw at one point that the fix was to turn off java script, but the crashes continue.

I think I have actually made some progress on this. After installing the Kindle software, I tried going to the Kindle Store (essentially a browser experience) and had crash after crash. I couldn't even browse a section before it dumped out on me. Since this was something that was repeatable, I used this as a basis for testing.

Thinking that this crashing was due to a memory allocation issue, I started going through the settings menus looking for something related. Side note: Android supposedly has some "intelligent" memory management which learns what to do based on how you use your tablet. From what I understand, it almost always keeps RAM at about 2/3 full, so this runs counter-intuitive to the idea that force closing apps will free more memory. If anything, killing tasks manually, probably just thwarts the algorithms which try to guess what they should do. In any case, killing tasks never helped the issue, nor did it ever yield much in the way of additional free RAM.

So I went for the "limit the number of background processes" approach. Under the developer options in settings, there is a way to limit the number of background processes. I found that immediately after I set this to 3, I could browse the Kindle store without it crashing within 10 seconds. In fact, it didn't crash at all! So I set it to 2 and still had full functionality. So I went to the browser and found that sites which would almost always crash, no longer did so. Ok, problem identified.

So after a bit of Googling, I found something which looks like it will be the key. Go to the Play store and get AutoKiller Memory Optimizer. Set it to "Optimum" and see if it works for you. It does for me...in spades! I have never seen this tablet cruise the web so quickly and smoothly as it does now. And this is important: TURN OFF JAVASCRIPT! There are some sites where you might need to enable it for certain content, but it makes the browser crawl where it's used heavily. The difference with and without is huge with regard to performance. But it's interesting to note, even with it enabled, I have been able to surf without crashing, after installing the AutoKiller Memory Optimizer.

Interested to hear how it works for others.

[Silicon Orb]

My second try at rooting my tablet went fairly smoothly just like the writeup. The only problem I had was at the end with Google Market ... just like with JackTheBear. I started Market and was just completing the account signup and when I tried to send it started complaining about loss of communications and then the screen went black. Now I just get an error message "Unfortunately, Market has stopped". I get the same message when I try to run the Android Market.

It looks like I need to follow the Bear and reinstall the Vendor.apk and try to find the update for the ap.

You shouldn't need to find an update. Once you have your account set up, Google will force one on you. I noticed that it wasn't long after installing the market, the little android shopping bag icon was replaced with the new "Play" logo.

Have you tried going into settings to set up your account, and then trying to go into the market?

[EERidenour]

Everything seems to be working

While I was trouble shooting my problems, I discovered that I was no longer able to copy files to the tablet root folders and, when I checked my root settings in ES File Explorer, I discovered that all of my root settings had vanished. It's very possible that I did not do a good job when I made the changes .... in fact, I am finding that "operator input error" is the cause of most, if not all, of my problems!

In light of this, I decided to do a complete reinstall (Device Manager to ADB to Root to Google Play). The process went very smoothly with no problems at all!! The entire process took less than 30 minutes and everything seems to be working OK (my wife has Google Play and Amazon and Words With Friends) so she is very happy!

So far we have not seen the "browser crashing" problem but we have noticed the Android browser seems very sluggish on busy sites or sites with lots of graphics .... this could be related to the memory problem that Silicon Orb is working on. We will try the Autokiller to see if that helps out.

I would like to thank this Forum, especially James Cozzby and Silicon Orb, for all of your help .... I could not have done it without you (and my wife thinks I'm a super hacker now <grin>)!

Bruce

[JackTheBear]

For me, it wasn't hard from where you are.

My second try at rooting my tablet went fairly smoothly just like the writeup. The only problem I had was at the end with Google Market ... just like with JackTheBear. I started Market and was just completing the account signup and when I tried to send it started complaining about loss of communications and then the screen went black. Now I just get an error message "Unfortunately, Market has stopped". I get the same message when I try to run the Android Market.

It looks like I need to follow the Bear and reinstall the Vendor.apk and try to find the update for the ap.

Bruce

All I did was use ES File Explorer and navigate to /system/app/ and click on vendor.apk. It asked me if I wanted to install, I clicked install and it went ok. Market worked enough to log in and download a couple apps. Eventually it blew up, so I was a little concerned. When I went back in, it had run an update, was now Play and all was good. No issues since. I didn't have to do anything to update it. It did it itself.

Good luck. I hope it goes well.
Jack

[900supersport]

Re: Latest Nexbook 9P stock ROM as of Nov. 2012

Just read through this thread you've made good progress.

If anyone want to take the next step and start cooking some of these changes into an image I'd be happy to help.

Alternately I can take a look myself when time allows, I don't have a next book so would need support.

Cheers

[valerca]

Strange. When I attempted to flash my NEXT9P with the package as instructed, and without changing any of the parameters, the unit didn't re-boot at the end, and wouldn't even wake up. I was thinking it might be bricked, but I re-flashed with another firmware and it recovered
...
Anyone else try it and get a different result?

Same here

[JackTheBear]

Tried Silicon Orb's GoClever rom suggestion!

I had the ICS rom rooted with Play installed. It worked, but it had some issues, even after trying a couple suggestions mentioned here and some other things. I got tired of the browser crashing, not being able to flip through email more than 1 screen at a time, barely being able to move from screen to screen on the home screen, etc.

So I tried Silicon Orb's suggestion for the GoClever R93 rom. You can follow the link above, or just go to the GoClever website and navigate to their download section, where they have the installation tool and instructions. Not only does it work, I think this is the best of the available choices so far, with a very close second by Finless's 1.5A rom. It seems completely stable, and I was able to install everything I tried, which was not the case with Finless's otherwise excellent rom.

The only caveat is the amount of storage dedicated to apps is ridiculously low. Under 200MB on a fresh install, and I'm under 100 without much effort. And Angry Birds Space and Star Wars still don't play. They will install, but not play. Probably for the best anyway. They take up way too much storage space.

It's not rooted, but I imagine that can be fixed, and Play is already on it, so no burning need for it. It's Gingerbread, but really, my opinion is the stock ICS rom was not ready for release.

[JackTheBear]

One step further, and we have a winner!

I went one step further with the GoClever rom. It turns out Finless already did a 1.4 rom for the GoClever R93 which can be found here. It went in easy. It's rooted. It's got tons of space for apps. It's got Market/gmail/calendar. It boots fast (35 seconds), and it runs faster than any rom I've tried so far. I've been using it for about 4 hours and it hasn't crashed or fc'd once. Wifi seems solid and fast. I downloaded about 15 apps from Market at once without any issues, and they installed twice as fast as on ICS. And the screens scroll normally. No browser crashing so far, and I was surfing for over an hour. Flash heavy sites run better than either the Finless 1.5A rom or the ICS Stock rom. Amazon videos play (poorly, but not much worse than a Droid Razr, this one's on Amazon.) Youtube in the browser plays fine. Swype hasn't fc'd, and it has on all the others except the stock R93 rom. And the camera works and it plays sound from speakers and headphones.

The only thing that hasn't worked is Angry Birds Space. I just don't think it will play on this device ever.

This is hands down the best rom for the Nextbook Premium 9 that I've tried so far, and significantly better than all of the others. This is how the thing was supposed to work. Granted, it's a rom built for another device, so you might brick your tablet, but it works pretty close to perfect on mine.