My sister recently bought herself an ASUS gBook A1050. It’s a pretty low-powered netbook, with around 2GB of DDR RAM, running Android 2.2 (Froyo). After trying to install a number of applications on it – to no avail – I rebooted the machine and when it started, it simply hung at the ‘gBook’ startup screen. To fix the issue, here’s what I did;

• Of course, we start with internet research - this post with similar symptoms wasn’t very helpful, but this one pointed me in the direction of upgrading the ROM.
• Using an SD card, I downloaded the firmware update and extracted it to the root level of the SD card
• Then I reset the gBook, and it booted OK from the SD card

The next challenge was the App Store – now Google Play.

• I encountered more difficulty here – a search for ‘Dropbox’ in the App Store returned nothing – so I had to download the .apk for Dropbox and manually install.
• I tried the same trick with the .apk for Google Play, but it keeps crashing on the gBook.

All in all a very negative experience with the gBook – unfortunately the first negative experience I’ve had with an ASUS