What if you don't do touchscreens, and you don't know Android from Deltoid? But, you just want to scan everything for any signals you can get, radio, tv, sat, and IP, and do some web browsing too! Would this A3 be good for me? How is the blind scanning? ... sorry to hijack the thread
Ok, well let me say a little on this Android business.
I'm not much of a tech wizard like you guys,, I really just started messing with satellites about, I dunno, maybe 5 years ago I think?
And being someone that is paranoid of google and the internet in general, I have never before owned or used an android device or google service.
I'm a photographer and an Apple fan girl. I've been using Macs and iPhones and iPads for quite a long time. (I also despise windows and don't use it except for an HTPC)
I do however consider myself very adept in the world of OSX/iOS and Apple stuff.
In preparation of getting an Amiko A3 I bought some cheapy little chinese phone/tablet aka Phablet to use as a controller for the A3. I also intend to use it with my DSLR.
When I got the little tablet, about a week before the A3 came in, I powered it up and I was like WTF IS THIS BULL**** !!???!??!?!?!?!
I totally flipped out. I hated it, I despised it, I didn't understand it, not at all, not even a little bit.
I spent two or three days swiping things, opening, closing, killing, trying to delete chinese gibberish things, and lots of cursing.
I had no flippin clue what I was doing. I had entered into an alien world and was lost, big times.
But I looked up some youtube videos of someone unboxing one of the little tablets like I have and I watched them change it to English.
That was the first step in the right direction. Then I watched a few videos on the google play store.
I was extremely upset at the permissions that some of the apps wanted. So I went looking for a way to fix that before I went any further.
That took me to a site that let me "root" the tablet which on Apple is called "Jailbreaking".
Then I was able to install some apps from outside of the google garden walls that allowed me to take back control of the thing. Very aggressive ad blocking for instance.
I got rid of most of the chinese gibberish apps but some are baked in and I don't yet know how to remove them but I'm going to keep at it until I do remove them or I break the tablet.
After about two weeks now I've figured out enough about it to be able to use it without looking like an idiot in front of friends now.
And for the 25 hours I had the A3 before I broke it really, really bad, I was able to make the tablet talk connect with the A3 and I was doing some really cool stuff with it.
With the Spark2 app I walked out into my backyard and stood next to my dishes and was watching TV on the tablet, coming from the A3 connected to the dishes I was standing next to.
I could move the dishes and change channels, out there in the yard, using my $87 chinese tablet.
One of the things I found in the A3, before I broke it, was that there were a TON of free IPTV channels. I watched one for awhile, some old, old, long forgotten movie from before my time.
What's really excellent about the A3 is that it's Android. And even though I don't have it now because I broke it and had to send it back to be fixed, I still have my little Android tablet with is also Android and while I'm playing with it here and now, I'm learning how to use the A3 at the same time. Well, except for the satellite stuff which the tablet obviously can't do.
Android is not that hard to figure out, it's just DIFFERENT than what I'm used to. And when confronted with something new and different, I flip out, curse a lot and click everything.
Another thing, which is related to the original question, yes, you absolutely can use the A3 to view security cameras.
I'm doing it with my tablet so when my A3 comes back from repair I will be able to use the same app on the A3 to view my cameras.
We have had a lot of burglaries here over the years and several years ago my roommate and I had issues with two creeps that had made death threats against us.
I ended up having cameras put in and over the years I've expanded it a bit, added more cameras and a better DVR for recording.
Video from my cameras actually helped put two guys in prison for a very long time.
Screen shot from my tablet. (blurred a tad) My A3 will also do this.
If I can figure out this stuff in two weeks you guys certainly can!
