[General Topics] Ouzo:
Hey everybody,

I bought an Advent Tegra Note a couple of days ago. I always connect my devices to a TV at some point but there wasn't too much infomartion out there about the Tegra Note before I got my hands on it so I just wanted to put some info out there for people who might be interested.

The Note has both micro USB and Micro HDMI ports so I bought a micro HDMI to HDMI cable to test out a few things with it connected to a TV. I've used MHL a lot in the past so I'm not sure whether or not some of what follows is specific to the Tegra Note or applies to any tablet with both HDMI and USB ports.

HDMI to TV:

When you plug the HDMI cable into the Note it automatically kicks the display into landscape so you don't need to worry about the orreientation of the tablet itself.

Sound output seems to be at line-out level. It sounds great if you happen to have your TV plugged into a HiFi, but it does mean you can't alter the volume on the Note itself while it's plugged in.

In my experience, when you plug a phone into a TV via an MHL adapter it seems to really load the hardware which has a negative impact on performance. I don't know if it's because the Tegra 4 inside the Note is so powerful or if it's a feature of having a separate HDMI output, but there's no noticeable slow down at all. By way of example, when I ran Epic Citadel with ultra high settings in benchmark mode, it still achieved 59 fps. Web browsing was flawless too with very smooth performance.

I should probably point out that I was testing this on a 720p TV, not full HD.

USB On-the-Go

With a small OTG adapter plugged into the micro USB port I tried plugging in a wireless keyboard and mouse and it works perfectly (bear in mind if you have a UK QWERTY keyboard some symbols are in the 'wrong' place which is bit stupid for a device being sold in the UK). Next up I tried a bus powered 80GB hard drive and this also worked fine. Finally I tried a mains powered USB hub with the keyboard and hard drive plugged into it and that also works properly too. The tablet appeared to be drawing charge from the USB hub.

Simultaneous HDMI and USB OTG

At first this didn't work at all, but I found if I plugged the USB OTG adapter into the tablet first, then the HDMI cable, everything worked fine. In this setup it really is like a little media pc - it performs very well indeed.

I also tried using a small bluetooth keyboard with trackball mouse with it and that works too. I haven't tried a controller yet. I've read elsewhere that Six Axis Controller won't work with it which is a real shame, but there you go.

Apart from the rather creamy/yellow colour tint to the screen on the Tegra Note, it really is an awesome little device. 35,000 points in Antutu for $200? Awesome!

If you're in the UK and you're frustrated by the lack of UK QWERTY keyboard layout ( no £ symbol etc) you can use the Median External keyboard app from the Play store without root. This will add a UK layout under the hardware keyboard settings area under the 'Language and Input' menu. Hint, you have to connect the keyboard to get the hardware keyboard menu to appear in the input menu.

UPDATE: After the official OTA update to 4.3 I noticed a few things:

It is no longer necessary for users to download the Medion External keyboard app to get access to a UK QWERTY hardware layout. Under the input settings menu there is now an option to select a UK Android PC keyboard layout. On both my bluetooth and wireless desktop keyboards, the internet explorer shortcut key works as the Home button. Regrettably the auto correct options for hadware keyboards still don't work.

Unfortunately bluetooth is even worse than under the original or updated 4.2.2 ROM. When steaming via A2DP there are regular dropouts and reconnecting paired devices such a Moga Pro gamepad repeatedly fails at times. A factory reset didn't help.

When trying to disconnect an external HDD in the Settings/Storage menu, not only does the USB drive get unmounted, the MicroSD card stops working. The capacity and free space and of the MicroSD card will read as zero after the external drive has been disconnected. Restarting the Note (or remounting the SD card) will fix the problem, though for me the Gallery and Google Music apps became corrupted and I had to clear the data in Media Storage, Gallery and Music apps and reboot to get things working again. This bug was not present before.

I've also been playing with an Justop EZCast dongle that I bought from a reseller on Amazon. Results are very mixed. In EZCast mode pictures are streamed to the dongle very well. Videos are really hit and miss. Some stream flawlessly while others stutter to the point of being unwatchable. In EZMirror mode where the whole of the tablet's screen is mirrored on the TV results also vary. Music streaming sounds good but there are often dropouts and 'pops' and 'sqeaks' every so often that are really annoying. Also, altering the volume on the tablet does not change the volume on the dongle (whereas it does if you stream from a Galaxy Tab 3 8.0). Streaming films is also problematic in that there are periodic interruptions that are really annoying. Finally, if you connect to a wireless access point while in EZMirror mode you can mirror your browser etc to the TV which opens up a range of possibilities. You can even mirror writing on the screen to a TV so the Note would make an interesting presentation device in various scenarios. Gaming is not recommended as there is latency of about a quarter of a second. In short, when the dongle works it's great, but for now it is flawed and I wouldn't recommend one. I'm not sure whether future firmware updates will improve the dongle, but I suspect its internal hardware isn't powerful enough, especially for HD content.