Amazon link to Rich's Teclast M89
I've been banging the drum on installing LineageOS for years now. I completely stand by that. It's a breath of fresh air for an old device. I have a family member with a B&N Nook HD that is donkey's years old which I coaxed into booting Lineange 7.1.1 and it gets every day use as a book reader.
I got another family member a 10.5" Galaxy Tab A SM-T590 . It's on Android 8.1 at the current time and should get Android 9 at the end of the month. Once it goes out of life, I'll Lineage it. Same with my newly acquired Galaxy S10e .
The SM-T590 is quite nice, pretty snappy. Was a £200 acquisition
(£220 after screen protector and case
). I would like to have the ability to remap the damn bixby button
(on the Tab and the S10e
) as I want none of that cloud AI horse feed. I would also have liked it to have a fingerprint sensor though
(everything should have a fingerprint sensor these days IMHO
).
It does have face unlock
(*cough* gimmick *cough
), but getting your face into the frame of the camera is entirely unnatural as the front camera's field of view is woefully inadequate and where you feel you should hold the device only has the top of your head in frame. This would be manageable if there was some sort of preview or guide, but there isn't. It's a black-box process.
Otherwise, it is a nice device. Most of the bloatware that it comes with is installed during first boot rather than being ROM shadowed. Thus, it was refreshing for a change to be able to uninstall
(rather than disable
) Fleecebook, Google's spyware and all the cash-cow games the OEM's are paid to pre-install.
I thought that the front and rear camera's were OK for what they are too. It hasn't got anything on the S10e, but they are not bad at all.