Epic Saga Chapter 7: Wherein I Break Down and Go Hunting for an Android Device that Runs KitKat

This post is the seventh post in the series: Uploading Images from PhoneGap/Cordova to Azure Storage using Mobile Services

Sorry for this post being somewhat delayed…I took a brief detour to try a third-party emulator for Android, but I found that it had the same blocking issue as the Android emulator (which I detailed here)—although it did deploy and run much, much faster.

To recap…in the previous chapter of my epic saga to create a Cordova app that uploads binary images files directly to Azure Blob storage, I was able to use Visual Studio to remotely build and deploy my Cordova app to the team MacBook Pro. However, unsurprisingly, the iOS Simulator lacks camera support for the capture plugin.

I placed an order (through work) for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 to use for this and other non-emulator-based Android testing. However, this device won’t likely arrive before December (which makes me sad because if I were buying it myself Amazon Prime would get it to me in 2 days).

In the meantime, I have been trying to use the new Visual Studio emulator for Android, which is included with the Visual Studio 2015 preview. This emulator, like the Windows Phone 8 emulator, uses virtualization (you can read more here). I’ve gotten everything installed correctly (I think), but now I am running into the same issues that I had with my Windows Phone emulator, which did once run, but not for a while now. I just can’t get the hypervisor running on my machine—here’s the -v output from the coreinfo tool:

 HYPERVISOR      -       Hypervisor is present
VMX             *       Supports Intel hardware-assisted virtualization
EPT             *       Supports Intel extended page tables (SLAT)

This indicates that my computer supports virtualization and Hyper-V is installed, but for some reason it’s not running. Hopefully, my next post will be about how I got the new VS emulator running and it was great. If not, then I will post about the results of my sample using the Galaxy Tab 4.

Cheers!

Glenn Gailey