I pity all the uninformed consumers who buy this, or even worse, people who receive this as a gift from those uninformed consumers...
My brother bought a Samsung Galaxy cellphone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy). The half-baked combination of hardware and software, with no updates available, made him soon regret the purchase. He was angry at Samsung and Google/Android for "producing such crap". Somehow he managed to return it and got an iPhone instead.
This experience made him to not buy an Android phone again. More of such bad examples/devices could become a really big problem for Android.
It seems that there's much dependency on carriers and manufacturers in the Android world.
What if security related bugs are discovered? Are there minor updates to fix these? And how fast are they deployed by the carrier or manufacturer?
To top it all off, they've disabled OTA and need a Windows only desktop software (Kies) to update the OS. The latest version of this doesn't upgrade even minor upgrades of the firmware.
A HN user suggested a workaround on another thread by downgrading the version of Kies. When I tried it, it didn't even show that a minor firmware upgrade was available.
While Galaxy is wonderful on the hardware side, it has miles to go with its software.
Yes, I know it is isn't as easy as that, but it would have to be better than the ghetto that is hardware company-supplied software.
Its bad when a device that was never supposed to run Android (the iPhone) can be hacked to run it better than a device that was designed for it.
The sorts of electronics they sell there are overpriced and low-quality unless they're actual name-brand items. An LED nightlight sold there is likely to be weak, and badly designed, and overpriced even at $5.
If I saw a $99 Android tablet at Walgreens, I would assume that it would be better to simply burn the $99 - at least then I wouldn't have a useless device to store or dispose of.
(I was just at a Walgreens, and they actually had some Wii units for sale. I wouldn't buy one there, but I assume there's nothing wrong with them.)
I don't know that Walgreens has that much of a reputation, but I think of them mostly as a drugstore, even though they carry a lot of random stuff. They are a fairly large chain with stores all over the country.
That said, they're not really somewhere you go shopping for high class goods or electronics.
nowadays they sell pretty much everything, even prescription medicine in a distant corner :)
most of what they sell is cheap snacks, 99cents products and trinkets.
also walgreens and other drugstores here all have their own brand of copied medicine "walgreens product X. compare to Brand Y product X" on the labels
If Android using the Apache license means that vendors only have to provide the (Google) source they started from and not for the final result, you basically can't hack what you got, but have to deal with code that was never customized for the device you've got. In effect the source was open for the vendor, but it isn't for you. So much for fixing bugs in what you get...
// praying that no-one I know buys one!