Review of the Cheap ZT1 ePad I Bought off eBay

Ecert omcre n a hile I bui a pircw of techjokogy...

Let's start that again. Reviewing this device with itself clearly won't work.

Every once in a while I buy a piece of technology which will, my friends warn me, be awful. Because I am an idiot I disregard this and base my decision solely upon the pretty eBay pictures and cheerful engrish item description. I wouldn't buy a car and a house like this but what the hey, it's £152 and I was drunk and curious.

I spend half my life reading other people's diligently composed reviews of random electronic tat and figured it was time to give something back to the world...

The ePad arrived this morning, about ten days after I ordered it. While good this was something of a surprise - when I checked the parcel tracking website ("International Mail Tracking System") linked from the supplier's email it claimed to still be in Shenzhen. Actually it still claims to be in Shenzhen! Maybe I am in Shenzhen too and never realised.




The tablet comes with:

1. Nice packaging. Very Apple-ish. Probably this is intentional.
2. No CD's or manuals, even though the auction promised one. Hm. Never mind, real men don't need instructions.
   
3. A dinky little telescopic stylus, possibly useful for selecting fine items on screen if you have fat fingers.
4. Cheap earphones which I immediately threw away.
5. (possibly) micro-usb - ethernet adapter. Given the device has wifi I don't know why. Perhaps I'll find a use for it someday.
6. A USB - MicroSD adapter. This is a bit weird since the device already has a MicroSD socket. Attempts to use it on the ePad (yes, with a MicroSD inside) result in a "Preparing Udisk" alert that never goes away and no apparent disk. Plugged into my Mac it works well enough.
7. Four square inches of cloth.
   

Physical Hardware

In the eBay auction it looks awesome. Shiny black fascia, metallic case, great screen full of icons. Friends have asked for pictures but there are plenty around already - check this article for a good idea.

In the flesh it is serviceable but less awesome. The fascia is made of thin, flexible plastic rather than glass and sits unevenly in the frame. You notice this most when it catches the light - reflections go wibbly-wobbly like a disturbed water surface. While the screen fits acceptably in the plastic body you can slip your nail between them. If you're like me you'll eventually ruin your tablet by levering off the screen off to investigate what's inside. But I won't, not yet. Not for at least another half hour.

What's inside is supposed to be a "ZT1" 1.2Ghz ARM chip, 256Mb of RAM and 2Gb of NAND flash storage. Very little of the NAND is taken up by Android but there doesn't seem any way to use it for your own stuff since all apps insist on loading their data from a "SD card". Really they mean MicroSD card. Maybe once I've rooted the device I'll fill it with a 1.7Gb file made up of the text "I am a fool who buys cheap plastic tat" repeated over and over again.

There's no 3G. You're on wifi or (wtf?) ethernet baby. Allegedly more modern firmwares may let you taste the 3G goodness if you plug an approved USB 3G dongle in but I haven't tested this.

And talking of that, whoever designed this thing really loves ports...

1. Power. That's right, it charges off a proprietary 9V adapter rather than USB like every other device in the galaxy. The adapter fits American two pin sockets and needs an adapter-adapter (supplied) for use in the UK.
2. Earphones. Probably this works but for reasons discussed later I haven't tried it.
   
3. USB. You can plug a whole bunch of things into this including a keyboard. In fact if you want to use the included development terminal application you'll need to since there's no way to coax the on-screen keyboard out of hiding.
4. Mini-USB (labeled "OTG"). Like the one which charges most phones. I'd like to say this is for charging or mounting the tablet as a drive on your computer but when connected up nothing happens. I don't know what it's for.
5. Micro-USB (I think; labeled with an ethernet icon). Presumably this is for the included ethernet adapter. I haven't tried this because the twentieth century ended some time ago.
6. MicroSD (labeled "TF"). Ought to take a MicroSD card. Recognizes mine but won't read it.
   

Also around the edge we have:

1. Nowhere for the stylus to go. You'll lose it in minutes.
   
2. A tiny hole labeled with a microphone icon. A microphone might live in there.
   
3. A hole labeled 'reset' which is too small for the stylus to fit. Unfortunate, since this hole's going to see more action than yo momma.
   
4. A rocker-button which looks like it ought to be a volume control. In most situations it isn't; instead "up" means menu and "down" brings up the standard Android task switcher.
5. A power button. We might hope this would put the device into some low-power standby mode like the power button on my HTC Hero but instead it raises a power off dialog that says in the finest engrish "Are you sure shut down?". And then it does. And takes about 15 seconds to start up again. Instant on this ain't.
   

On the front by the screen there is a single iPad-esque button which in most places seems to mean "back" and an LED (red for charging, blue for running). I don't know why we need a blue light to say it's turned on: the presence of icons, programs and well, y'know, stuff on the screen already tells the user this. In fact the constant bright LED is a bit distracting. I might stick some tape over it.

The whole device feels a bit cheaply made and it creaks when flexed.

Nerds! Here's the processor it admits to running:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 5 (v6l)
BogoMIPS : 1005.97
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture : 6TEJ
CPU variant : 0x1
CPU part : 0xb36
CPU revision : 5

Hardware : IMAPX200
Revision : 0000
Serial : 0000000000000000

A quick peek at /proc/meminfo suggests only 192Mb of ram exists. I don't know where the other 64Mb went - perhaps it's used as screen buffer. Perhaps someone in China got hungry and ate it.

Perhaps the biggest weirdness about the device is that it's damn hard to figure out who made it. It might be made by a company called ZeniThink. "WE ARE MANUFACTORY DIRECT OF Tablet PC!!!" claims the eBay auction Apparently in China companies copy other companies copies of Apple products. Maybe this is a bonafide ePad, maybe it's an ePad rip-off. Hell, can the real ePad stand up? No?

Those kooky communists sure have a weird attitude to intellectual property.




OS and User Interface

The first thing you'll want to do with this baby is charge it. The eBay auction suggests a full 8 hours. It looks like you can still use the device while charging so here we go...

Switch it on for a warm-boot (power button on the side) and you're presented with an "ePad" logo. They've pinched the "e" straight out of the Internet Explorer icon. After a few seconds the home screen pops up - as promised in the description it really is running Android 2.1. It's standard Android fare: taskbar-type-thing at the top and a slider at the bottom to bring out the programs menu, the browser or a file manager.

The next thing that jumps out is how sparsely populated with icons the home screen is. There's a reason for this - even though it's a 1024x600 TFT and the icons are only about 50px tall everything is arranged on a 4x4 grid pattern. It looks downright weird - icons & widgets appear at their usual Android resolution but there's so much space left between you could drive an SUV between them. A 5x10 grid would suit it better.

Another oddity is the android top-bar (someone tell me the correct name for this?). It's grown to about 40px tall to suit the larger screen and has a collection of stuff: time, home button, back button, battery, wifi strength and the volume up/down looking confused after its surprise eviction from the rocker on the side. Icons added by the manufacturer are colourful and fit it well but the standard Android ones (wifi power and, bafflingly, phone signal strength) have been poorly enlarged - they look dithered and bitty.

I start by setting up access to my home wifi. It works well enough for the first half-hour (I browse a few websites) but after turning the device off and on again the tablet loses the ability to see any wireless networks - either my own or the my neighbours. It takes a hard-reset to clear this (hello mr paper clip). A booting screen pops up with a picture of an ashamed-looking Tux and in 30 seconds or so it's up and running again.

The screen is acceptable. It's a 10.2" 1024x600 TFT and the viewing angle's not great but is glossy, colourful & has no dead pixels. Contrast is acceptable but it's far from Apple's high standards. No multitouch (so no pinch-to-zoom) but you can live without it. Applications are fairly responsive - the tablet is packing a 1.2Ghz ARM and it makes all the difference.

Like most Android devices it contains a tilt sensor so the screen automatically rotates to show things the right way up. It's a smart idea; books are best read in portrait format but movies are landscape-shaped. Unfortunately the ePad's tilt sensor doesn't work very well. Sometimes it'll flip the screen around at the slightest provocation, at others it'll stubbornly refuse to and leave you to shake the living daylights out of your tablet until things until "up" becomes up again. I bet they get a lot of returns due to shaken tablet syndrome.

The on-screen keyboard - there's often between a half and one second delay between pressing a "key" and something happening. This might not sound too bad but believe me, if you're used to typing at anything more than five words per minute it's gonna hurt. If you're writing your opus on this you'll want to plug in a USB keyboard.

Next I try to install a MicroSD card (known-working, tested a moment earlier in my Mac). A notification pops up saying "preparing". Sadly it never goes away and the card never becomes usable.

There's no Android Market app - instead it comes with some weird third-party installer. Click on an application to install and nothing happens. Using the browser I visit the websites for a couple of Android app projects and try to download .apk files to install directly. A dialog helpfully tells me that since there's no SD card I can't download anything.

Now I come to test the music & library applications. It ought to make a good media player and ebook application, right?

Wrong. Both tell me "Cannot read SD card". Bummer. Shame, given the whole reason I bought the damn thing was to read documents on.

The browser (standard Android 2.1 fare) works pretty well. Despite this device having twice the CPU grunt of my HTC Hero and hanging off a 10Mbit broadband connection it's still very slow to load pages but once rendered they're pretty and very easy to read. Bookmarks & zooming work in the usual way.

Some of the built-in apps are so bad they're funny. There's a diagnostics app (left in by the developers to help you finish their OS?) which claims a temperature of five degrees celsius (wrong, even my flat is warmer than that) and a battery voltage of zero. Uh, no. There are settings options for "show compass in maps" (uh no, there's no compass built in) and "haptic feedback" - again no, there's no motor built in to make it buzz.

Here I'm starting to touch the root cause of why the ePad is not-great. Android may or may not be ready for use on tablets but the guys who adapted it for this device did a totally half-assed job. There are lots of places (showing more icons on home screen, removing menu options for missing hardware) this shows and the whole interface has an unfinished feel to it.




Conclusions

The ePad is cheap, shonky and plasticy but hey, it costs a third as much as an iPad so I'll forgive it that. The build quality was never going to be great and it has a generous number of ports. Hardware-wise it's good enough.

What really lets the device down is the build of Android. I won't whine about the engrish dialog boxes (they're cute!) but aligning apps & widgets in a 4x4 grid on the home screen is downright strange. Absent hardware is still listed in menu options and the absence of Android Market is absolutely painful. The whole power of IOS & Android is the ease with which you can customize your device with third party apps and without that power you might as well have bought a typewriter. One without any physical keys.

This could be a neat little device. It's light, thin and has a reasonably good screen. I won't be chucking out my Macbook anytime soon but for browsing websites, reading PDF's and watching the odd show on iPlayer it would be perfect. But right now the software totally lets it down.

Tomorrow I'm going to snag myself another MicroSD card then try installing an alternative firmware and try turning it into a useful reading device. But it feels like by the time I've turned an ePad into a useful tablet I might as well have given in and got an iPad.

Buy this if you are poor or a masochist.