I've had the Orphan M16 for a couple weeks now... it's from the ZT180-M16-A10-ZenPad4-A105 family all seem to be same machine with Zenithink ZT-180(a) processor (Visually verified) which is an ARM11 running at 1GHz. I'm pretty old school as having started developing hardware in the 70's so of course I opened it up to see the design and construction quality, which turned out to be surprisingly good for the price level... very simplistic design, well done... the 2 holes in the bottom are access for insertion of something about the diameter of a large size paper clip which push spring loaded locking bars around the edges of the screen so makes opening and closing pretty safe and easy...The design and packaging is well thought out and pretty basic... the machine inserted parts look well done... the hand soldered connections wouldn't have passed my inspection in the early days, but nothing was completely disconnected... a few colder solder joints wouldn't have been hurt by quick touchup...There's no problem if you don't have the heat sink on the WIFI as it's a trivail add... wifi is basically a usb wifi dongle, shell-less, hard wired to internal usb port, and stuck down with double sided non conductive rubber tape so adding a stickon heat sink(mine had it) and even an antenna extension is trivial for a careful beginner... The TXPower hack is a big win heat and signal wise but more on that later...Now in the Mid 80's I moved over to Unix OS development/software and here we need some basic cleanup... but again nothing that's not pretty straightforward and will get fixed by many in the near future I'm sure...The Zenithink 0804 software update is better than what was shipped initially on most of these tablets... but it's still a very basic and an over bloated generic build it seems... still a few Chinese APPs built in the English delivery... No Google Market shipped/installed but loading apps from slideme or alternate market places works adaquately... also if you have an android phone grabbing apps. from market and copy the apk's to sdcard allows installing easily in the tablet... Rooting is easy and I'd strongly reccommend for anyone really interested in customizing their install... I mentioned the TXPower 'hack' which really helps as the WIFI is over pushed by a lot on TX power which produces considerable useless heat, wasted battery life, and signal distortion which limits range... the hack is a config file edit (requires root) that lowers to the TXPower setting from 100% to 20% and makes a huge win for really a one line edit...Another useful hack I've used is to replace the generic build libdvm with the Samsung ARM11 Optimised build (found in these forums) which hangs considerably less as handles errors more gracefully and performs ~25% better in many benchmarks...There are a long list of APPS that likley most would prefer to remove as pretty useless... This requires Root as they (lazy?) installed ALL APPS in /system/app... on that note the Filesystem layout is really awfully basic compared to most Andorid devices... For example...Typical layout for Android Phone=====================================================================dev: size erasesize namemtd0: 00040000 00020000 "misc"mtd1: 00500000 00020000 "recovery"mtd2: 00280000 00020000 "boot"mtd3: 04380000 00020000 "system"mtd4: 04380000 00020000 "cache"mtd5: 04ac0000 00020000 "userdata"Layout for ZT180-M16-A10-ZenPad4-A105=====================================================================# cat /proc//mtdcat /proc//mtddev: size erasesize namemtd0: 10000000 00080000 "system" mtd1: 18000000 00080000 "userdata" mtd2: 06400000 00080000 "cache" mtd3: 4fc00000 00080000 "Local-disk" So no seperate boot or recovery partitions in the VERY basic generic build and packaging... No USB driver for ADB connect availble it seems... so need to use 'adb Tablet-IPADDR:5555 connect' format to access over the network instead... After rooting I'd suggest some pretty basic APK installs... - xscope browser (far more functional built on latest webkit lib) - launcherpro home (smoother and less cpu hog) - root explorer (root enabled file browser, built in remount for rw, built in txt edit for config files) - Autokiller (task manager, with memory mgmt. presets) Normally once you get a cleaned up and tuned ROM for these I would Not reccommend task managers like Autokiller, but in the current state, this build is Really rough... boots up starting tons of useless, and sometimes broken apps, doesn't have reasonable memory mgmt tuning applied, so for now I'd reccommend using Autokiller, and setting presets to 'Strict' to force Android to cleanup Idle useless apps ASAP leaving memory for what you really want to do... All I have time for now as I have a real job... but hopefully you can see why I give this early tablet a C+ overall... would be a B+ if not for all the work still required with the software... but that may change in the Very near future from some already ongoing efforts including folks on this forum...
I haven't really used the device for video's yet apart from checking they are working, my son did watch some yu gi oh movie on youtube the other night and he didn't complain. Someone else mentioned watching videos for 4 hours so that's long enough to watch a movie or two I guess before a recharge required. Also I think on battery life there is a certain element of luck different people seem to get different charge levels.With the chinese knock offs you can't really expect the quality of say something like the iPad, if you are looking for that kind of reliability or quality I would probably wait for some of the tablets due to be released by the likes of Samsung, LG, etc
