Developing Android Apps Using a Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet

I have been developing an Android tablet app for the past few weeks. I am still in the learning stages, however, I thought I would share some of my challenges so far. I quickly learned that developing using the emulator is not feasible due to its slowness. If you intend to finish developing an app in your lifetime, you need to develop with a connected device. Luckily my Lenovo Thinkpad tablet came just in time. Getting it connected and ready for developing was not straight forward however.

To connect to an Android device from your computer, you must install a USB driver. If you are developing on an Android Developer Phone, Nexus One, or Nexus S, then you can install the USB driver provided by google.  If you don’t have one of these devices, as I didn’t, then you need to find the OEM USB driver. The Android Developer site provides a page that links to the different hardware manufactures for tablets/phones. Unfortunately, the Lenovo link points to a page that is in Chinese! Even if you use google translate to translate the page, the downloads don’t work and won’t allow you to communicate with your device. Trust me, I tried it. After searching the internet for half a day, I finally found a solution.  You must install PdaNet.  This application is made for a different purpose, however, it installs the adb usb drivers that are needed for your windows machine to connect to the Thinkpad tablet. After installing PdaNet you MUST do one more step. You will not be able to connect if you do not do this step. You must create a new ini file in C:\Users\\.android named adb_usb.ini. In that file you must type the vendor id for the tablet. In the case of the Lenovo Thinkpad, you would type 0x17EF in the file and that is it. Note that if you don’t see .andorid in your user folder, you most likely have hidden files/folders not visible. If you make them visible then you will see this folder if you have installed the the Android SDK.

After doing the previous steps, you should now be able to develop using the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet as your testing device.