Used smartphones/tablets for Guatemala deployment

Deployment
#1

In our planned deployment to 55 schools in NW Guatemala, we will be installing Chromebooks and RACHELs. However, to complement this, we are collecting used smartphones and tablets in Chatham Ontario - so that the school children can load books from the RACHELs, and take them home to read. We figure that the more smartphones/tablets that we can collect, the more children who can simultaneously access the material on the RACHELs.

However, we have come up against problems - and would like to understand how others see these issues. While we have tried to restrict our request to Android smartphones and tablets (to avoid the fact that Apple devices cannot handle the Flash content), we have received:

  • Kobo e-readers. While these are Android, they appear to require a Kobo (or Google or Facebook) account which makes little sense for a device that is not connected to the Internet. Further, in playing with them, they appear unable to download pdfs. You can use them with Wikihow, but each pdf download fails. Any ideas why?
  • Sony’s version of the Kobo reader. These are not Android devices, and seem also to have trouble with the pdf files. And they are very difficult to read - so I suspect that they are of no use.

Has anyone had any experience with such a campaign? Come September, we are going to engage our local high schools - to see if we can flush out a few hundred late model used smartphones and tablets.

1 Like
#2

Hi @ronsat – I don’t know anything about those particular devices, but often times the web browser on the device controls how PDFs are handled. If you can get an updated version of Chrome or Firefox on the device, you might find many of your issues solved.

1 Like
#3

I don’t know if it is ethical to say this here. If its not I’m fine with the post being hidden.

When I used to use early versions of the Nook and Amazon Fire, I regularly jail broke them to install vanilla versions of Android. Perhaps you want to explore that for the Kobo

1 Like
#4

Thanks for the suggestion. We are going to get some of the local high schools involved in collecting smart phones and tablets - and jailbreaking the Kobos might be a good student project. (I’ll check with my daughter first on the legality. She is an IP attorney. I believe that the laws here in Canada are somewhat more lenient than those in the US.) Instructions are available online.

1 Like