Using An Old Tablet To Write

Quite a few years ago, I had a Kindle Fire 7 tablet, to use as a tablet, a fun time device as a child. Recently, I have wanted to get an Android tablet to do some writing - you know stories, boosts, random shit, the works. I have found a decent one which comes as a bundle with a stylus and a wireless keyboard, which I have added to my Christmas list (save me spending my own money on something I'll actually use). In the meantime, I realised that my old Kindle Fire tablet can install Android APKs. Fire OS (or whatever OS Amazon call it) is a customised version of Android 5.1 (yes old, but it works). So what did I do?

Well...

I installed an old version of Chromium (I think it was still version 90 something 😬) for all my web browser needs - rather than using Amazon's shitty Silk Browser.

I then installed Termux to have a lovely terminal environment as I am so used to now at this point. Inside of Termux, I installed git and neovim and instantly clone my Writing repo (this is a private repo, anything worth sharing will be posted here on my blog). I then started writing away, set myself a goal on Writing Month of 10,000 words in the month of June. Currently I am sitting at 401, not bad, but falling behind a bit.

I have spent hours sitting and writing on my Fire tablet, I have enjoyed the experience; but I have had a couple of gripes to get over.

1- The screen is quite small - perfect for some things, but horrible for others.

2- The outdated OS - I am having to use outdated versions of apps just so they will work on my device, it's really old - as I mentioned before it's based on Android 5.1 and bearing in mind we recently had the release of Android 16, it's really old.

Apart from that, I have been really enjoying myself using it, gets me off my phone but lets me still use the device anywhere, not tied to my desk like my laptop does (poor battery health it's pretty much a desktop in laptop form at this point).

With all that having been said, that is all for today, have a good one and I'll see you in the next one.

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