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More than a week with v1.07 firmware and so far I’ve not experienced a single freeze with Chrome, though I’m not using it that often. Complete system freeze while using Chrome was the last issue that I would find hard to accept and live with. I will update if I will encounter this again.

The rest of the issues were:

• Touchscreen input not working after wake up from sleep. The solution I found was to connect a USB dongle of a mouse.
• Graphic driver seems to crash completely (“noise” on the screen, unresponsive system) when using Moon+ Reader, looks like page rendering related. Solutions are: make sure that you never open a pdf in Moon+ when another is already open, in other words: don’t minimize the app if you want to view another pdf, but close the pdf by going back to the app main window (book listings). And the other solution is if you did minimize the app, opened another pdf and now Moon+ having trouble to render page turn then clear the RAM / stop Moon+ before the driver will crash, I use the widget of ES Task Manager to clear the RAM.

The second issue might affect other apps and maybe games but as my main interest is reading books, pdf documents, and a little web browsing I can’t testify about that and I won’t test that.

Also, Acrobat Reader is still unusable for me, and if you really love this app like me then it might be a major flaw, I still haven’t found a pdf reader which is both fast on rendering and with a well designed minimalistic modern GUI (like why the frack viewing the TOC requires opening a new window and not floating widget).

To sum it up, after updating the Android firmware and figuring out the kinks and quirks of the tablet, for my main use as pdf reader the tablet meets my needs. If I will figure out a good system on Windows for managing and syncing books and bookmarks across multiple devices (ATM it looks like I will need to code something myself) then I will probably move to Surface Pro 4.

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@mooggle it’s A5C8, X98 Plus I.

I’m now with the latest v1.07 Android firmware and I still experiencing the touchscreen issue (once one v1.07, 3 times in general), but I found out that if I connect an input device (specifically a mouse) then the touchscreen will come back to life, so my solution is to have a mouse usb dongle in my bag ready to be connected whenever this will happen.

I haven’t use much Chrome so I don’t know if the freezing issue appears on v1.07 but it is there on v1.05 and it’s very annoying when it happens.

Xodo does look pretty good, and it is blazing fast as Acrobat so I’m pretty happy with it, at least for documents, I still go for Moon+ with pdf books as it doesn’t save the bookmarks in the pdf but in external files, much preferable behavior to avoid syncing large pdfs.

[fluffy]

I succeeded updating my tablet with the v1.07 firmware manually.

If you like me don’t play with Android firmware flashing every day then after installing Intel Flash Tool or the Phone Flash Tool and the related drivers then try at first updating your Android system with the GUI tool (Intel Flash Tool or Phone Flash Tool), the setting USB debugging and USB MTP (enabled by default) will need to be enabled.

If it doesn’t work then you can manually flash the firmware with fastboot command (AFAIK it is installed with one of the mentioned tools above).

1. From the file Explorer on your Windows PC when hovering above v1.07 firmware folder use shift + right click to open the context menu and you’ll be able to choose to open command prompt at the folder path.

2. Now you can enter the command “adb reboot bootloader” to reboot the tablet and enter fastboot mode. When the tablet reboot just choose Android from the boot menu and it will go to fastboot mode. Also I believe it’s possible even without running this command to enter the fastboot mode by pressing power+vol up after choosing Android from the boot menu.

3. Now you can start flashing the image files to the tablet with fastboot, I believe the bare minimum are boot.img (kernel and ramdisk) and system.img (the Android OS) but I also flashed the bootloader. At least in comparison to v1.05 the only other different files are installer.efi and loader.efi which I haven’t figured what to do with and they are not part of the update procedure in installer.cmd.

3.a. To flash the system enter the command “fastboot flash system system.img”.

3.b. To flash boot enter the command “fastboot flash boot boot.img”.

3.c And finally to flash the bootloader enter the command “fastboot flash bootloader bootloader”.

4. Now you can boot the device by pressing the power button.

Be advised that this might only work if you have Android firmware v1.05 installed. If you’ve got another version then you might need to flash the other files also. I used diff to binary compare the other files.

[fluffy]

Did anyone succeed flashing this on dual boot device, specifically with the latest Geekbuying firmware installed?

I can flash the Android update 1.05 of Geekbuying with Intel Flash Tool but not this update, storage layout related?

 

Edit: nevermind, I manually flashed system.img and boot.img with fastboot.

[fluffy]

Another bug I found is that after wake up from sleep the touchscreen does not respond and you have to reboot the device (again this is Android).

This already happened twice for me in the last week.

It’s pretty disappointing to find these issues after watching a review here on the site that does not mention these problems. I would expect that if these issues are reported here in the forum then at least the review article will add that info.

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Aldiko is pretty slow for pdfs from what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem to able to handle my heavy pdfs which are scanned with OCR (100MB+) and it copies every pdfs I open which is a major annoyance, I use Calibre Companion to handle my books I don’t need Aldiko to copy the files again (and I don’t have enough space for that).

On the other hand, Bookari is amazingly fast though page turning was very annoying in the past (when I use it in the past when it was called Manatano), I’m trying the latest version right now and it look good so far though I’m really starting to like Moon+ Reader’s sync to Google Drive feature (page position and bookmarks)..

[fluffy]

p.s. for anyone else which his main concern is reading pdfs I would add that:

Battery life is quite good, with low settings you can squeeze ~13 hours of reading.

Moon+ Reader is handling pdfs pretty well on this device, page turns are pretty fast, and very acceptable for scanned pdfs with ocr (and these are pretty heavy).

Amazon Kindle app is amazingly fast on reading but does crashes from time to time and also the Kindle store is very sluggish.

The Google PDF Reader app is pretty stable and fast but as a very limited features app (no toc, not bookmarks) it’s pretty not useful for me.

Also wireless is not perfect, Calibre Companion had some difficulties transferring large pdfs (130MB+) it took a few tries to successfully succeeding with the transfer, it’s not really that bad just was really frustrating to see the transfers failing a couple of times, but I should emphasise that I only received the tablet last week so I don’t have a strong opinion about the wifi.

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