The Galaxy Upcycling program that has been conducted by Samsung helps encourage reusability and prolong the life of its old devices. A glimpse of the impact of this program has been revealed by the South Korean tech giant recently. Here it shows how people can turn their old Galaxy smartphone into a baby monitor. However, leaving all these far behind, a great move has been achieved by one person. And they converting their old Galaxy Tab S5e into a full-fledged Android Automotive head unit with support for Android Auto.
Galaxy Tab S5e ran a vanilla version of Android Automotive OS
As showcased by Esper’s Senior Technical Editor, Mishaal Rehman. He demonstrated a Galaxy Tab S5e that ran the vanilla version of Android Automotive OS. To be noted, it is Google’s full-fledged operating system for car infotainment units. In addition to this, apart from running Android Automotive. The offbeat tablet also supports Android Auto. It means you can sync it with your smartphone.
However, things seem good from the outside but yet it needs to resolve plenty of bugs, that need to be sorted out. For starters, the location access is unstable, while Google Maps is receptive to crashes. Also, the profile setup is faulty, and the weather widget isn’t showing any data. There’s also a message on the screen which says, “pre-production hardware not for sale”.
Also, Mishaal seems pretty serious about this project, as he aspires to bring Android Automotive to more devices. He intended to make it possible for other people too, to repurpose their old tablets and bring them a new life. One of the Twitter users asked Mishaal if he going to consider offering a generic system image (GSI). It’s basically one version of Android that can be run on various devices. And the same is often used for beta testing, on this, he replied, “Hopefully.”
As a chain of this remodification, another device that Mishaal is looking forward to dabbling with is the Spotify CarThing. However, that does nothing more than offer you control over the Spotify music playback. Now, Mishaal’s new plans are to modify it in order to run Android Automotive, which definitely bring it a new breath of life.
