ODroid U3: Hello Android

I got an Odroid U3 , a tiny, low consumption and yet powerful computer. I want to replace my dead Raspberry Pi which acted as mediacenter, and add some gaming to it.

It turns out that knowing what to install is not totally trivial. There is a myriad of images, different linux and android versions. I am documenting what I started doing:

• There is a big collection of image links here.
• I downloaded an android Ice Cream Sandwich, 4.0.3. (The 4.1 and 4.2 versions were said to not work from SD cards; which is what I bought (eMMC is more expensive)).
• The actual installation steps are here. Some clarifications below...
• First, one needs to burn a .xz image:
  xz -cd ./IceCreamSandwich-4.0.3_CouchPotato-U2-HDMI-SD.20140101.img.xz > /dev/mmcblk0
• This image is from a small SD, and I needed to resize to my 16Gb card. The partition to enlarge is some FAT32 in the middle, so there are quite a few steps involving backing up contents and copy them back. Details here.
• What takes time is (1) to burn the .xz, initially. The backup is just about 250Mb in size

My first impressions:

• Android runs smooth, some games are nice too. But I already found some cons...
• I cannot have my USB external HDD get recognized. This one has two ext4 partitions (full of movies I was using with my old Raspbmc). Some "StickMount" and "Paragon NTFS" are installed, and I tried others, but no luck yet.
• XBMC was slow to play a 720mb from a pen drive (fat32, it did work). Another player pre-installed in this image worked ok, with hardware decoding.
• Three times already, Google Play was stuck and unable to download new stuff from the android market (some error shown in the notifications). The only solution I found from the forums is to wipe Play's data from android Settings; then remove my gmail account, reboot, and start over adding my account and re-downloading stuff.
• The whole UX is far from ideal. The OS thinks it is a tablet. All UI is oriented to dragging, pinching, using huge amount of scrolls -- as if your fingers were on a touch screen, and not moving a cursor on a big TV. Totally awkward on a small touchpad from my wireless keyboard. Games expect you to touch everywhere too... not to press keys. I guess this is android!

I just read there is a GameStation Turbo including XBMC with CEC support (for my TV remote) and some games too.... It seems to be linux, too, which I will like more. Going to try out the next few days!