Simple Games for Cheap Android Tablet

My Autistic son has developed quite a liking for hand held electronic devices - he likes our daughter's Nintendo DS with an animated dog on it, and apparently plays with an iPad at school.
I am not a fan of 'i' anythings because of the difficulty developing software for them, so I thought I would get him a cheap android based tablet to try.   Just need some software for it now.

I have got a Eken M009S from Amazon - it was just under £70.   I was hoping to develop some simple games using javascript to run in the web browser, which would mean they would work on any device, but the processor on the device is not up to it - there are some nice javascript game demos at http://kevs3d.co.uk/dev/ which work very well on my laptop, but are so slow on the tablet that they are not useable.

This is a shame as it would have been nice to develop something that would work on any platform - I think I will have to remember how to write 'native' (or at least java) android programs....

Using Android Phone as a Modem

For quite a while I had been able to use my Samsung Galaxy Apollo phone as a modem - I just plugged it into my work laptop (running Windows XP) and it appeared as a modem, which I could use to connect to the internet nicely.

Then I tried (and failed) to update my phone using Samsung Kies and it stopped working.   I remembered as part of trying to get Kies to work I found an obscure code to type on the keypad to switch the phone between 'PDA' mode and 'Modem' mode.   I have just managed to switch it back to modem mode, and this has got my modem working again!

To do this I had to type *#7284# on the phone dialer keypad.  This brought up a menu where I selected the USB option to be 'Modem'

Now plugging it into my computer shows it up as a Samsung Mobile Modem.   I have the phone number set to *99***1#, which seems to work ok.  

I disabled the internal modem in the laptop because sometimes windows tried to dial that one instead, which is not connected to anything.

Android User Interfaces

I am working on a colour processing program for android (more later once it works). A fundamental part of this is to create a custom view to use in the user interface - it will eventually display a colour wheel, but it is nowhere near that yet!
The problem was that I am creating a subClass of View, which draws something on the screen.
I then simply added it to my UI XML description and tried to use it.
I got an InflateException, which was a bit of a surprise.
It turns out that I made a mistake - I had overridden the simple View(Context) constructor, which would be fine if I was adding the view directly from a program, but to use it from XML you need to override another constructor, View(Context, AttributeSet).

Now I have done that it works. Sorry this makes no sense unless you are used to Android things, and if you are used to Android, it is probably obvious, but this will help me next time I forget! I found this out here.

Android Development on Ubuntu

I just got an LG GW620 android mobile phone. I want to use it for mapping (http://www.openstreetmap.org). There is an android editor called Vespucci available, but it needs some work to make the UI easier to use. I thought I would have a look at the source code to see if I can work out how to modify it.
The android developer web site says that it is best to use the Eclipse IDE, but when I tried I got all sorts of errors about un-satisfied dependencies.
Fortunately someone had posted some instructions to get it working on Ubuntu (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8842292#post8842292).
Now I have followed this I have a working IDE to develop Android applications, and have got a basic "Hello World" application working. I have also downloaded and complied the Vespucci source code, and run it on the SDK emulator.
Just need to understand how Android UIs work now....