Offbrand Android Tablet - Google Mail/contacts/calendar issue

Question

I bought a Pandigital Supernova 8" tablet with Gingerbread OS, for a really good price, and despite the fact it had a lot of oddball apps on it, I was able to root it, and get google play/gmail etc on it. I'm having a real problem though, getting Google calendar/contacts to sync. I installed the Gmail app, it prompted me to login to my gmail address and mail itself works fine. But.. The contacts applet and calendar do not sync with my gmail account. If I go into the contacts applet it says there are no contacts, and there is no google selection in the "add accounts" area. While trying to figure this out, I found there were two .apk's missing, GoogleCalendarSyncConnector.apk and GoogleContactsSyncConnector.apk. Once added and the tablet rebooted, I figured this would work, but alas, it did not. What am I missing??

Answer 1

Warning - I've not tried this. I've a lot of experience with Android but haven't specifically tried hacking Google services on to a non AOSP based ROM. I recommend that you make a full nandroid backup through clockworkmod or any other recovery tool before you attempt this. If you can't backup, I'd think seriously about not trying this.

That said - Google doesn't like ROM developers ship their ROMs with all the Google framework apps installed, which is good for you because it means that everything you need to get up and running properly with the Playstore, GMail, Google Accounts etc can be found in one handy zip file. Have a read up of this page, take note of this paragraph:

Google Apps packages are not cross-compatible with other major Android versions. For example, the 20120224 pack for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) is not compatible with Gingerbread (Android 2.3). Likewise, the DRC83 package for Donut (Android 1.6) will not work with Honeycomb (Android 3.x). Flashing an incompatible package may cause a variety of bugs, boot-loops, crashes, force-closes, kernel panics, plagues, rashes, coughing, sneezing, headaches, diarrhea, vomiting blood, blood dripping from scrotum, thermonuclear war, unending Tic-Tac-Toe games, Mayan Doomsday, flooding, purple pustules forming on the face, a bricked device, exploding batteries, or nothing at all. Regardless, it is not recommended, and support will not be provided by any competent developer to a user who has done so.

The file which matches your OS version (Gingerbread, 2.3) is http://goo.im/gapps/gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip.

Flash this file via the recovery console, or you can install manually by following the script at \META-INF\com\google\android\updater_script.

Again I warn you that you could mess up your device, and I'm willing to bet there aren't that many ROMs out there if you mess up the current one.

Good luck!