Hi,

I am interested to use the Android port of Squeak VM [1] on a tablet device. I have been able to install it on a recent Android emulator (with Android 2.3); it starts, shows menus, etc. I used the apk file found in the googlecode repo of [1], installed via adb.

One problem is, the emulator is very slow, so I am thinking about getting an actual tablet device to experiment with. The variety of tablets available is wide, so I am trying to narrow the choice, preferrably to its low price end ;)

Disclaimer: I am not experienced with Android at all, just getting started, but have a practical need for a tablet application, and see Smalltalk as a good choice of implementation language.

Here are few questions:

1. Is Squeak UI responsive enough on a 600Mhz CPU tablet, or say 1 Ghz is necessary? 2. Are there known tablets where Squeak VM just did not install/work by any reason? Installation via adb is sufficient for my needs. 3. My application requires some speech synthesis. In the PC application prototype I wrote a wrapper which invokes flite [2] and passes the phrase to speak to it via command line (voice is not perfect, but IMHO better than Klatt). Can Squeak access Android TTS service (I am guessing its name is eyes-free [3]) in any way? At last, there is a flite port for Android [4]. In general, is there any way to call Java code from Squeak currently implemented? 4. The current version of Android Squeak does not support text input: is this due to limitations in previous versions of NDK? NDK r5 claims that input subsystem is available, does this lift the limitation?

Thanks for any ideas. I probably could already run my application on a Windows/Linux tablet, but these tablets are more expensive and choice is much narrower.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/squeak-android-vm/ [2] http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/ [3] http://code.google.com/p/eyes-free/ [4] https://github.com/happyalu/Flite-TTS-Engine-for-Android/