Changing the OS from a VIa 8650 7" netbook

As a WinCE adicted I was resisting to buy these new chinese netbooks for too long. But now finally I got mine from dealextreme ( http://www.dealextreme.com/p/7-tft-lcd-windows-ce-6-0-via8650-cpu-w... ), after pondering a lot, because it doesn't have a touchscreen (one of the best features of our HPCs). But I was excited about the possibility to install diferent OSes to this little machine. Mine came with WinCE6.0 installed, but I heared that there are Android ROMs for chinese netbooks all around, and I wanna try to run it, maybe even configure a dualboot WinCE / Android. But unfortunately all Android images I found was for 8505 processors. As I don't want to transform my working WinCE6.0 netbook into a chinese paperweight, I wanna know if anybody was sucessfully installed android or any other linux on their 8650 based netbooks. Also, I will need WinCE6.0 images to come back to WinCE if I want, and I will probably do! I googled a lot about this, but couldn't find anything. I know that it is possible because looking at dealextreme I can find the exactly same netbook with the same specs, but running Android instead of WinCE.

There are tons of VS8650 netbooks with Android on them on eBay right now. I haven't seen any ROM images (Android, CE, or dual-boot) anywhere, though. I'll be picking up an 8650 netbook with CE 6 on it in the near future - I'll stick with CE because Android is no fun without a touchscreen.

I would like to try out one of the new 8650's with a touch screen, waiting for a us based seller to get them in @ a decent price.

There are tons of roms for the wm8650 tablets/netbooks. I personally have an m009s tablet and a generic 7" netbook that my custom rom "Modroid" works on. http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/20864-rom-universal-modroid-v8-base...
As for the wince recovery files you're on your own there. I haven't seen any yet.

Cheers

thats exactly the point! I found some android roms at slatedroid forums, but Im afraid of not being able to return to wince... Is it possible to save my current nand data and then restore it latter? Thanks

http://netbook.poodwaddle.com/ you can get your windows CE recovery files here, i have played around with the android firmwares and always return to windows CE by using these

Dude, this looks great, but unfortunately its for the WM8505 processor, and Im looking for roms that will work on the VIA8650 processor. Is there a similar place for my netbook processor?

Thanks!

Well you're in luck. I found a Russian wince6 wm8650 firmware and modified it back to English and made a bunch of changes and added/removed some software. Simply extract the zip to your microsd card and power on. The flash process will begin, it will boot into safe mode (in chinese), then it will copy the full system. Remove SD card when it says to, then power off. Power back on. It will boot, then quickly reboot the first time after the flash (because i have a script set to enter some registry entries).

After the install is finished you have have roughly 200 mb free on the "operating system" partition, and 1.5gb free on the nand for software, music, photos, etc.

What you get:
All warez and/or illegal software removed.
Original Chinese software removed.
Sounds, wallpaper and graphics have been replaced to mimic Windows XP.
Installed Flash 9
Installed GAPI.
Installed .NET CF 3.7.
Some common file associations have been preconfigured.
AIM, MSN, ICQ and XMPP/Jabber messengers installed.
A few small simple games installed.
Notepad, Wordpad, FoxitReader installed.
TCPMP and MilkyTracker installed.
Some utilities and a slew of other useful software installed.

Download (74mb): HERE

Cheers

Edited by RTFM 2011-10-05 5:00 AM

RTFM--

I don't even own this machine, but I downloaded your OS nonetheless. Many thanks for your nifty work.

Jake

RTFM,
Many thanks for your work! Do you think that this version of wince will work for my netbook? I really dont wanna mess everything. Because it seems that there are other versions of the 8650 processor and maybe some small differences in hardware, like video card, etc... What are the specs of your netbook? As you can see from my first post, mine is a 350Mhz 8650 branded "imos". If it works, I can latter start working on a dual boot with android, what do you think? Is it possible?

Thanks!

In theory it should work. Works fine on my no-name 7" wm8650 netbook that originally came with android 2.2. Specs are the same as yours except mines 800mhz (which yours should be also. I think the 350mhz was a typo).

Cheers

RTFM,

I will look for my proc specs at the wince configuration and tell you what it says. By now im still waiting for the netbook to come from china. Can I trust in the specs informed by the wince?

Somewhat. TCPMP reports 650mhz, but under linux/android it reports 798mhz.

Cheers

I extracted the .zip to the sd card and it will not start the reflashing process. I have a 8650 netbook and I am using a 2 gb sd (not sdhc) card. what am i doing wrong??

If it's like the 8505, you just copy the \script8650 folder onto the root of the SD card. (I assume you don't need to change the name of \script8650 to just \script, though trying that can't hurt if it doesn't autorun with the original name.) I'm wondering if it isn't really an 8650 - I haven't seen one rated as slow as 350MHz. Even if it is, though, it might require more than one attempt - we've seen this with a few folks' 8505s.