We are joining for an RFP bid of a electric utility company for their GIS field application. The major requirement is that the minimum OS should be Android 3.0(Honeycomb). One of the reasons behind this requirement is for them to use Citrix application. The only competition we have is the Panasonic Thoughbook which uses Android4.0 (ICS). Is there a roadmap where our ET1 will be upgraded to ICS in the near future? Toughpad also states from the attached comparison document that ET1 can only be managed by MSP. Have their been any deployment of our ET1 being managed by a 3rd party MDM? End customer is currently testing Airwatch MDM software.
ET1 against Panasonic Toughpad// Expert user has replied. |
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ET1 was not shortlisted due to ICS OS requirement and our high price against the Panasonic Toughpad. Airwatch was not even tested yet with ET1.
You may want to check with Soti as they are working on supporting an Android Client and not sure where that is from a time perspective. Cheers, Mark
I've a similar issue but with Wavelink TE. Even if Wavelink TE works on the ET1, with Android 2.3 is not possible to handle/input keys like F1, F10, F12 even using something like the opensource HackerKeyboard that provide the attached function key keyboard.
This derives by the fact that the full desktop like keyboard support was introduced only in Android 3.0. Reading from the Google documentation:
: http://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-3.0.html
Keyboard support
Support for Control, Meta, Caps Lock, Num Lock and Scroll Lock modifiers. For more information, see META_CTRL_ON and related fields.
Support for full desktop-style keyboards, including support for keys such as Escape, Home, End, Delete and others. You can determine whether key events are coming from a full keyboard by querying getKeyboardType() and checking for KeyCharacterMap.FULL
TextView now supports keyboard-based cut, copy, paste, and select-all, using the key combinations Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+A. It also supports PageUp/PageDown, Home/End, and keyboard-based text selection.
KeyEvent adds several new methods to make it easier to check the key modifier state correctly and consistently. See hasModifiers(int), hasNoModifiers(), metaStateHasModifiers(), metaStateHasNoModifiers().
Applications can implement custom keyboard shortcuts by subclassing Activity, Dialog, or View and implementing onKeyShortcut(). The framework calls this method whenever a key is combined with Ctrl key. When creating an Options Menu, you can register keyboard shortcuts by setting either the android:alphabeticShortcut or android:numericShortcut attribute for each element (or with setShortcut()).
Android 3.0 includes a new "virtual keyboard" device with the id KeyCharacterMap.VIRTUAL_KEYBOARD. The virtual keyboard has a desktop-style US key map which is useful for synthesizing key events for testing input.
In details the KEYCODE_F12 event is defined only from API Level11 and forward:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/KeyEvent.html#KEYCO…
So, back to my initial point.
It seems to me that the only way to have this KEYCODEs supported on the ET1 is to wait for our own Android 4.0 release....
any thought on this?
Arnold, How has the ET1 Air Watch testing gone for your customer? We currently have a customer that is testing Air Watch with many issues and are talking about moving away from the ET1 (300+ devices). the issues they are having is when they loaad the Air Watch client and want to load a public application (IE, Adobe reader, etc) the Air Watch client apparently needs to access Google Play store which is not available on the ET1. Then when they want to load an internal application apk they cannot auto launch it to a point where it tells (pop up) the end user that an application needs to be loaded, so accept. They have worked extensively with Air Watch and was told by them that because the ET1 has Motorola "Sauce" in it that changes some of the security and OS features that it is not possible to do all the things that they want done. Hector and Richard, I see that you mention that Air Watch has a client for the ET1 but have either one of you (or your customers) actually implemented, deployed and managed your devices to the extent I spoke about above?
I suggest you reach out to the Product Manager - Luis Llamas with your questions.
The answer to both questions is YES. ICS is on the road map, dates need to be from the BU. MSP is not the only MDM, you can use Airwatch, Soti, etc. to manage the ET1.
Citrix Receiver runs on the ET-1 with no problem, so that shouldn't be an issue. The apk is available on Amazon AppStore if you can't find it anywhere else. We are enabling ET-1 management by third party MDMs, and both AirWatch and SOTi currently have clients available for the ET-1. We have not yet published a committed plan for moving to ICS, but from what you wrote, it sounds like GB has the features your customer needs. Let us know if we can help.