[General Topics] JRngln:
Hey everyone! I thought I'd get this out here.

I just recently picked up this POLAROID A8 8" Tablet from walgreens $94.15 out the door.

Just to let everyone know It came with root access, I got it home started toying around with it popped in a SD card that I had SuperSU and Root Explorer on, allow unknown sources was already checked so I used the native file manager and tried to install SuperSU, it installed, I opened it up, it asked to update the binary, I said ok, it said success, so I went back and installed Root Explorer opened it, it asked for Superuser permissions I said yes and Voila!:victory: FULL ROOT.

I then called southerntelecom to ask about the firmware update to support google play and what not; if it would revoke Super User permissions like most firmware updates do. I could tell that they didn't really want to give me a straight answer, was told they couldn't answer, that they weren't sure if it would or not, (how could they not know? :confused:) I was even put on hold a couple of times, I was eventually told that someone in tech support was going to install the update on one of the tablets they had there and they would call me back and have an answer for me.:rolleyes: That was on a Friday, and believe it or not, Monday afternoon they called me back :eek:But they still really didn't have an answer for me:(, said that tech support didn't get a chance to do an install to check :rolleyes:.

But anyhoo what I WAS able to find out, was that, supposedly, every thing needed to support google was already installed, just missing the google APK's because of licensing, kinda like CM. So time to do some investigating. I took a jelly bean gapps package (I think it was for 4.2.3 cause google ears was in it) and started comparing; and what I found was it did seam to have all the needed underlaying google framework support files except for com.google.android.media.effects.jar, Facelock.apk, Phonesky.apk/aka playstore, and of course the regular google apps that you can download from the playstore. I of course had everything extracted out of the gapps.zip file and I just dropped them into their respective places and folders, set permissions and ownership, deleted dalvic cache and cache and rebooted and waited..........aaaannndddddddd BAM! :highfive::victory:

I now have an 8" tablet with full Root SuperUser capabilities, 1ghz dualcore processer (overclocked with set cpu,) 1GB/DDR3 ram, Dual cameras, WI-FI,(look's like it also has support for a 3g dongle), Bluetooth, HDMI out and fully supports google play store and whatnot.

I cant complain, pretty pleased with it actually, it's fast, and seems to have decent battery life and I also now have init.d support on it. There's a few more tweaks I would like to do to it yet like expanding the 4gb internal storage with the 32gb external SD card; ideally I would like to seamlessly merge the two so the tablet would see just one 36gb storage place for all apps and whatnot but I think I'm hoping for too much on that one:silly:

So if anyone has any input that I might be able to accomplish that please let me know, or if anyone has any questions feel free to ask I'll or someone will try to get them answerd for you.

I'll also try and get some screenshots for you showing some benchmark scores.

Hope this has helped you out in some way :D