[Other SmartWatches] FelixGno:
Hi Folks,

I've got the phone for 3 days now and I'm fiddling around with it to see what it can do and what not. I had an Omate derivate with rectangular screen (512MB/4GB, replaceable battery 600mAh) which I found much better to use and which had an sdcard slot. I'm pretty much p...d off that it is impossible to find anything like it with more memory. I found one phone with 320x200 screen in landscape, but only with Android 4.4 and no card slot and not enough memory. So finally, I bought the X5 Air which is not ideal for me, because of too small a battery and the round screen that makes a lot of problems. 2 GB Ram is good, but 16 GB Flash without the possibility to expand is rather mediocre for my purposes aside of the weak battery .

But here I am, and willing to give it a try. ;)

Here is what I did so far:

Rooted with Kingroot

Works, but installs bloatware.

Tested a few launchers:

From the ones I tested I like Evie the most. It works nicely and works quite well with the round screen.

Installed Linux Deploy

Works perfectly. I just copied my installation file from the old phone and can now access the desktop via VNC from any device in the network. Only drawback is that swapoff doesn't seem to work, and obviously it is not a good idea to have a swap space on the internal flash memory of the phone. Defects are prone to happen. With 2 GB, swapping is not necessary, that's why I wanted more memory. More work needed here.

Installed Crono Surf

Looks good, but if I could combine an alternative launcher like Evie with the generic watch face engine, that would be nicer.

Installed Ki4a

Works perfectly, but to access settings, the screen has to be set to the smaller size (rectangular) and it is better to open it in parallel on a normal phone because you cannot read all descriptions.

Installed HERE We Go

Seems to work, but due to the limited flash memory, you cannot download all the maps you would like to have for offline navigation.

Installed Titanium Backup

Works, but some buttons seem impossible to access.

Removed Kingroot

Kingroot installs too much bloatware for my liking. And it cannot be uninstalled via the normal app management (system app). Maybe there is an uninstall routine via the settings in Kingroot, but it cannot be accessed on that stupid round screen. So I used Titanium Backup to uninstall it. Restart after that and Kingroot and Root seem to have gone without trace. Additionally, I reset the device. Until there is a proper way for rooting the X5 Air, I will stay with Kingroot, but it is good to know that I can revert it.

Basically, I can more or less do with the phone what I intended, but one important thing is missing, standard bluetooth tethering. The menus for setting up a hotspot are completely missing. Anybody knows a way or a tool for that?

When I have time I want to try out xposed framework, maybe that can solve the missing options problems, but so far, I really find it annoying to have hardware that is limited by the software. What is this, Apple? Even my 4 yrs old Omate derivate could be easily converted to a fully working android device with homescreen, notification bar etc. And above all it had only 2 buttons but still all the phone navigation actions were possible, incl. a working running-apps list.

Kind regards,

Felix