RANDOMNESS

Freelander I20/Newman N2 Review

2013-02-25T18:52:00.001-08:00

Freelander I20/Newman N2 Review

Why

I sold my M1S and wanted to buy a quad core phone. This was among the cheapest quad core phone available and it also have a 13MP camera! Camera, speed and sound quality. If you offer me something exciting in any of those three category then you can be sure I will be wasting my money to try it out!

Specifications

SOC: Samsung Exynos 4412 1.5GHz quad core
GPU: ARM Mali-400 MP4
RAM: 1GB DDR3
OS: Android 4.0.3
Internal Memory: 2GB Apps, 5GB internal.
Screen Size: 4.7" IPS
Screen Resolution: 1280*720
Webcam: 13.0MP Rear and 2MP Front.
Battery: 2500 mAH Li-Ion.

Cost

I bought it off Aliexpress.com for about USD 300.

Packaging

The accessories included were an additional back cover (an ugly orange one), USB cable and charger and a fake Beats headphone (at least I assumed it was fake. Not that it matters though. Not into overly bassy headphones anyway. ).

Build Quality

Overall, the build quality is just alright. Not excellent but not too bad either. The front consists of the huge screen, the front camera and the 4 capacitive buttons which I hate.

The back cover is removable and is made entirely from plastic. The cover has a textured finish to help users grip the phone easier. In practice, the texture does not bother me but it doesn't improve the grip either when used one handed.

Also at the back, you have the 13.0MP camera, a single LED flash and the loudspeaker.

At one side you have the microUSB port and a space for you to insert your nail to open the back cover.

On the other side, you have the power/unlock button, volume buttons and the camera button. The volume buttons feel rather mushy but still workable. The camera button is a 2-stage button where you half-press to focus and full press to take a shot. The power button also feels good.

Screen

The IPS screen is huge (compared to my M1S) and since its an IPS screen, the viewing angle and colour reproduction look subjectively good. Here are the pictures comparing it to my Pipo M3.

The brightness is plenty although the screen will still not be visible under direct sunlight. What I like about the brightness is that the minimum brightness setting is just perfect for using the phone in the dark (in your bedroom before you sleep). There is no obvious light bleeding from the screen itself but....

There are obvious light bleeding from the lights of the capacitive buttons. In general use, it won't be very noticable but when you start watching movies with dark screen then it will be quite obvious. Good thing is it turns off after some time so it won't be that disruptive during long movie sessions. Why can't the manufacturer just go for the onscreen button!

Camera

Now for the main selling point of the phone, I present to you the 13.0MP camera! But before that, I would have to talk about the snapping experience. The camera is noticably slower at taking a picture (compared to the M1S) and as a result, you would have to hold still for a little bit longer than usual or you will get a blurry picture. The flash performance is also sub-optimal. There has been a firmware update file for the camera but I have yet to try it.

Rear Camera

Indoors Performance

Normal mode with adequate lighting.

100% crop. Click for bigger image.

No flash in low light.

100% crop. Click for bigger image.

Low light with flash.

100% crop. Click for bigger image.

Night mode in low light.

100% crop. Click for bigger image.

Outdoors Performance

Outdoor 1. Window view.

Outdoor 1 100% crop.

Outdoor 2. Stairs.

Outdoor 2 100% crop.

Outdoor 3. Local train station.

Outdoor 3 100% crop.

Outdoor 4.Train station 2.

Outdoor 4 100% crop.

Overall, I find images in well lit environment to be very detailed thanks to the overkill amount of pixels. The images look clean with noises only visible at native resolution. The colours are very true to life, which is a surprise considering the recent trend towards over saturating images in other devices. However, as it usual is with camera phones with small sensors, it falters in low light condition and the untimely flash did not help either. If you do want to take a photo in the dark, I would suggest using the flash light instead of relying on the night mode as it introduces too much noise and very little detail, if any.

Front Camera

Front camera is the usual stuff. Fixed focus = always blurry. I think it's good enough for skype considering most of the built-in webcam in notebooks are just as horrible.

Speakers and Headphone jack

The loud speaker is pretty boring, to be honest. The sound output level is very limited (you can barely hear it at full volume if you use it while in the shower). Its definitely on the quiet side compared to most of the other smartphones I have used before. The sound is clean so would be okay if you mainly use it to watch youtube videos but music does not sound pleasant at all due to the tinny quality.

Thankfully, the headphone port works alright and the sound output is sufficiently loud and have no obvious coloration which is nice. Bass in particular does sound a little soft to me but overall is still usable and would be an alright source to use with your low-impedence headphones although it does sound a little dull to me. A brief search on the Google Play would easily fix that though :).

Battery Life

The phone regularly lasts 3 days although on average I have to charge it every 2 days under my typical usage which is pretty much a typical user's usage. I make calls/SMS/browse the internet/play games using my phone everyday and sometimes use it to listen to musics either through my headphones or through the bluetooth speaker. I am still not used to not charging my phone every day but hey, this is definitely something I look forward to getting used to :))). However, if you do some google searches on this topic, some users are reporting that their battery quickly drains from 100% to 80% for no reason and then last for days. I have not personally experienced it but just thought it would be good to let you guys know that YMMV. I think even the heaviest power user would get at least a day out of this phone.

Wireless Performance

One word; mediocre The wireless module performs alright but its range is much less than most of the other phones (from Sony, Nokia, Samsung and even ThL) that I have used before. If you are close to the router then it will perform fine and speedwise, it can utilize all the bandwidth I have (30Mbps) so cannot comment more on that.

Now, my room is about 10m away from the router but is separated by 2 thick brick walls and understandably some devices have difficulty staying connected which is why I am not totally blaming the phone for this for the boring performance. However, after using it for about one month, I found out that it definitely disconnects more often than any of my previous devices.

Just to put offer some objective information here, my notebook (of course will perform better since it has multiple antennas and uses way more power for the wireless module) reports the wireless signal strength at -59dBm whereas the phone reports -82dBm. Keep in mind that the unit (dBm) does not scale linearly (its logarithmic) so you can see just how much worst the performance is. As another reference, my Pipo M3 tablet reports the signal strength as -71dBm at about the same spot.

GPS

I don't actually use this feature a lot but during the few times when I did actually use the GPS, it worked although it does take longer than usual to get a location fix. Will update this when I have some concrete numbers (how long does it take to get a fix outside etc).

Signal Quality

My unit performs fine with it managing to stick to my network almost at all times (O2) and the 3.5G connection was fine too. However, a quick google search online reveals many users reporting lost signal and having to restart their unit to resume operation. So your mileage may(will) vary.

Exynos 4412

Performance

Sunspider 0.9.1

Browser

Chrome

Firefox

Rightware Browsermark

Browser.

Chrome.

GLBenchmark 2.1.4

Basemark Taiji

Linpack

Antutu

Epic Citadel

Call Quality

The phone performs fine during calls although it could be more sensitive as people would sometimes ask me to repeat myself. Not perfect but bearable and usable most of the times.

Issues

As usual, buyers of new Chinese gadgets are often used as guinea pigs by the manufacturers to test their hardware, or in the case of the Newman N2, their software. Throughout my testing period, I have no major complain about the hardware of the phone except the capacitive button light bleed and the horrible loud speaker.

*Before continuing, I must remind you that I am running the stock version of the phone's firmware which came with the phone. Clicking on the check for updates did not find anything. I planned to update the software once I finished writing this review because I think it would make an interesting follow up post.

My main issue with the phone lies in the software, it is really unoptimized at best and just horrible at worst. The performance wildly varies, take for example, the Antutu score will wildly varies from one run to another with no clear indicator as to what might have caused it. At first I thought it might have been overheating so I took it outside (0 degree Celsius) and re-ran the benchmarks and guess what? Its still as wild as as hookworm. If you run it after restarting the phone then it starts to get a little more consistent.

Sometimes, my unit would slows down for no reason taking ages to load up apps. 3D games would lag so bad that I can't believe the phone is running on a quad core. The only solution I found which worked was again to restart. Also, although my unit comes with Play Store installed, it cannot sync with the Google servers so for example your calendar events won't be synced into your phone. Of course that can be fixed manually but if you are expecting a more pleasant experience then this is not the phone for you. From what I have read, Newman is not the only one to blame here as many other Chinese manufacturers are doing the same due to some weird Google/Chinese government licensing terms.

The camera also have many issues with the software version loaded on my unit from factory. One of it is that if you use flash to capture, you will get this blueish image as it snapped the photo at the wrong time (not synchronised with the flash). Annoying. Oh and the focus is also a hit and miss most of the times. Newman has released an update file to update the camera firmware but I have yet to test it. Will post a follow up post regarding the performance after update in the future.

Just to emphasize just how unfinished the software is, Newman has released more than 5 software updates since the introduction of this phone. Well, you can look at this situation from 2 different angles. First, you could say that Newman after sales support exists and is actively supporting the device. From my perspective, it just shows how many bugs are there in the current software and from the feedbacks on the forum, it is apparent that they are not efficiently addressing them either.

Conclusion

This is the easiest conclusion I ever have to write so far. The phone is an unfinished product and hence is not fit to be sold to the general public in its current software status. Fortunately, the guys at the Vondroid forum are working on multiple ROMs to try and compensate for this but make no mistake, I am not endorsing manufacturers that sell products that are still in their Alpha stage. If you want a good, tested and cheap phone, I still would recommend any Xiaomi phones. Heck, even the ThL phone I tested before performed better and more consistent overall. On the bright side, it was still fun experience reviewing this product.

JXD X18 Bluetooth Speaker Review

2013-02-12T12:33:00.000-08:00

JXD X18 Bluetooth Speaker Review

Hi readers!

It has been a while since I posted any new materials here. Been busy with studies, all the exams and coursework. With all that behind, now its time for another review of a chinese gadget. It's not a tablet, not a phone, not a headphone but its a portable speaker. The JXD X18 have the honour of being the first portable bluetooth speaker to be reviewed on this blog :)

Marketing and Specifications

The speaker is promoted as the following:

Fashionable Water Cube design
Super bass: high-accuracy sound cavity seal design and super bass effect
Super stereo sound: Use CSR stereo double track chip, double stereo speakers extremely good stereo sound
Super function: this mini speaker supports connection with iPhone, iPad, Android mobiles, Tablet PCs. Listening to music, playing games, watching movies, it’s a good choice of fashion and wireless life
Convenient: No matter when you at home, meeting friends or travelling, sweet music will always be with you.

Model	X18 - Pink
Chip	CSR BC5
Version	Bluetooth V2.1+EDR
Transmission Power	CLASS2 4dBm
Modulation mode	GFSK, 1Mbps, 0.5BT Gaussian
Bluetooth Protocol	OPP,OBEX,SPP,A2DP,AVRCP,FTP,HS/HF,DUN Profiles
Wireless Transmission Range	Normal: 10M, Extreme: 20M
Input Voltage	DC5V/500mA
Sensitivity	-80dBm@0.1%BER
SNR	≥75dB
Distortion	≤0.5%
Charging Current	300±50mA
Working Current	≤30mA
Standby Current	≤0.4mA
Battery	800mAh
Output Power	3W/4Ω
Item Size	1455632mm
Package Weight	300g

Price and Packaging

I bought the speaker for around GBP22 (excluding the shipping fees). The packaging was simple and a bit disappointing. It comes in one single brick box.

Inside was the speaker, a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable and a MicroUSB cable to charge the speaker. The included manual is in Chinese, not a surprise but it was in such a bad condition that it would be better if JXD didn't include it in the first place. There is also no charger included.

Build Quality

I have only been using the speaker for about a week but these are what I found out about the build quality of the speaker. It is solidly built, there is no rattle whatsoever when in use and it doesn't creak even if you apply some pressure to it.

The front consists only of the speaker grill.

The top have 4 buttons on it labelled as the power, bluetooth, volume down and volume up buttons.

Nothing on the bottom. Just 4 rubber feet which keep the speaker stationary during use.

On one side of the speaker are the 3.5mm jack if you don't want to use Bluetooth as well as the MicroUSB port for charging.

My unit (unfortunately) comes in the pink variant. The pink paint is pretty durable so far with no chips or scratches. The only problematic part is the back of the speakers where it easily scratches. If you are especially anal (as in picky, not that "anal" :D ) about the cosmetic appearance of your devices then make sure you apply some sort of protection (cellotape?) to the back before actually using the speaker.

The back with plenty of scratches only after a week of abuse.

Sound Quality

The overall sound quality is actually quite good with no particular frequencies being unnecessarily overpowering. To my ears, the speaker sounds balanced although it is leaning a bit on the warmer side. The mids are obviously the dominant part but the treble thankfully does not seem to suffer too much and as a result vocals come out clear and well projected. The treble is actually quite natural sounding but it is definitely recessed compared to the mids.

Under low and medium volume, the bass is there but not as dominant as I would have preferred. It gains more punch and power if you increase the volume but then it would get too loud for me. At stock settings, the speaker has a quite flat response so I was interested how it would react to equalizers. Using equalizer to slightly boost the bass, the sound is more to my liking. The bass can be heard/felt across all the volume without overpowering the rest (provided you don't boost it too much, of course). The impact is as good as you can expect from a speaker this size. If I have to nitpick, I would say that the speaker could attack those bass notes a little more fiercer because as it is, its too soft but then that is just me nitpicking. The bass is also satisfyingly tight most of the time considering the size and price.

The speaker can get really loud. In fact I mainly tested it at 50% volume and below so to not disturb my flatmates. During my limited testing at maximum volume, the speaker held up well producing louder output while keeping the same audio quality. I think the speaker can fill a 10mx10m room quite easily but don't quote me on that :)

It only suffers when playing complex audio with multiple things going on (if you listen to classical music, I am referring to the moments where the singer reach the most difficult passage of the aria and at the same time the orchestra goes crazy, the hair-raising-moment as I call it) then there is obvious loss of details. While I do not know the exact setup of the innards of this speaker, based from what I heard, I can safely speculate that it consists of two full-range drivers with no separate tweeters. I guess tweeters would be too much at this price range.

Although there are obviously two separate drivers producing the sounds, I can't really hear any meaningful stereo separation due to the close proximity of the two drivers. That does not mean its at the same level as those one driver portable speakers, its just that you should not expect to get the stereo separation effect like a properly set-up traditional 2.1/2.0 speakers. As such, there is also pretty much non-existant soundstage.

One issue though is that if you chose to use with the wire instead the bluetooth, the audio quality then depends on your connected source. If your device can't provide enough power to the speaker then it won't be as loud as it would be if you used bluetooth. Honestly, I don't think this is JXD's fault although they can certainly integrate an amp to amplify the source but that would have certainly raises up the price.

Finally, there is no obvious discolouration and compression effects as far as I am concerned. That or my ears are not sensitive enough. All in all, this a good speaker!

Battery Life

Charging the speaker took about 2hrs if you fully deplete the battery. I have mainly used the speaker through Bluetooth so I cannot say if the battery life would be different if you forgo the Bluetooth connection and go with the wired solution. I found that the battery life depends alot on the volume you use the speaker at. I mostly use the speaker at around 40% volume (yes, it is loud enough) and under this setting I can squeeze more than 8hrs of use (I do not know the exact figure, I am not used to timing something for this long besides who listens to music for that long a day anyway?). If the specifications are correct then the 800mAh should last for 18.67hrs at most at the maximum setting. Will update this once I can actually confirm the actual run time.

Ease of Use

Everything is good so far but as always when it comes to Chinese products, there will be some sort of compromise and for this product it is the ease of use. The volume buttons on the top does not actually change the volume, rather they function to change to the next and previous track. I think it would be far more useful to have all of them (change tracks and volume control) on the speaker.

The offending buttons.

And also, the speaker can only pair with one device at any time. If you happen to change the sound source, you would have to long press the bluetooth button and re-pair the devices. Most of the times, even though you are only using one device, you might have to re-pair the devices nonetheless. Troublesome but not exactly a deal killer. It takes at most a minute to do but for sure this could be improved on next revision.

I have also experimented with the bluetooth range and my conclusion is; if the speaker is within the line of sight with respect to your bluetooth device (no obstruction in between them) then you can probably get up to 10m but in real world (with multiple walls in between), 5m would be the maximum if you are lucky. Personally, I can only get up to 3m away from the speaker before it actually loses connection. The sound quality doesn't deteriote in the process and it just disconnects suddenly when you get far enough.

Conclusion

This is an excellent speaker although not without its downside. The JXD X18 is my first JXD product and if their other products are of similar quality then I would certainly be purchasing more. I like the sound quality, it gets very loud while maintaining a very acceptable audio quality but can also be personally tailored (using equalizer) to further customize the sound to the user's liking. The battery life also rather excellent.

The negatives include questionable material used for the backside and the cumbersome bluetooth pairing which could certainly be improved. At GBP22 (minus shipping), this would put it directly in competition with other products from lesser known companies such as Veho, Soundwave and Tecevo. However, at least the JXD X18 now is a known quantity whereas I have yet to read a good review on any of the other competing products. Maybe I will buy one bluetooth speaker per month and then do a showdown between them all. (wishful thinking).

If you are interested in buying one, Amazon is selling one and you can check it out at the link below. While you are on Amazon, you might as well check the alternatives and see if there's any other promising products and comment below :

Newman N2/Freelander I20 Review Coming!

2013-02-09T17:08:00.001-08:00

Hello readers~

I just noticed that my last post was posted more than 1 month ago :O. That is simply not acceptable!
Do not despair though, I have plenty of things to post for us, Chinese gadget freaks :) I am currently in the process of reviewing the following products:

1) Newman N2 a.k.a. the Freelander I20.

It has a 13MP rear camera! Here's a sneak peek:

100% of the image:

2) Freelander AP10 Mini-PC

3) JXD X18 Bluetooth Speaker

4) B3503 Bluetooth v3.0 Wireless Audio Receiver

PS: I simply do not have the time to reply to your comments on any of the posts, sadly :( Life is pretty hectic nowadays but that is to be expected considering this is my final year of university.

On the bright side, I will be free for 3 months once I graduate so will definitely do some work on this blog or simply publish a new website which I personally designed. Looking forward to be free!

Regards,

YS.

Pipo Max M3 Review! (My first RK3066 tablet).

2013-01-02T15:22:00.001-08:00

Pipo Max M3

Why

I saw an advert saying this particular tablet have stereo speakers. You know I can't resist testing speakers.. That and I wanted to have a tablet with RK3066 to play with.

Where
As per usual, I bought this off Aliexpress for USD202 including DHL shipping using some coupons :).

Specifications

Im too lazy to write the specs. Here's a picture I found online instead:

Build Quality

Overall, the build quality is actually quite good. Doesn't feel like a premium device but doesn't feel excessively cheap either. It reminds me of the Samsung Note 10.1. The back is all aluminium and hence feels good. Buttons all worked well and give satisfying feedback. One minor issue is if you press the some parts of the screen, it can creak a little bit which suggests that there are some empty spaces inside. Not really an issue really, just an observation.

Packaging
When I received the tablet, I was not expecting that it would come in two boxes. One contains the tablet and a cloth.

The other box contains the accessories: charger, headphone and USB cable.

The tablet itself.

The back is empty except of the rear camera and the reset button for getting the tablet into flash mode.

Volume and home button.

The right side is full with ports. From left to right are the charging LED, charging socket, MicroSD card slot, mini HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack, slave and host USB ports, power button and lastly the microphone hole.

One of the two front facing speakers.

Screen

10.1" IPS screen. *Insert all good comments about IPS here*. The brightness can get pretty high. One thing I noticed about Chinese tablets with IPS screens is that they are too bright even at lowest setting. If somehow the brightness could be reduced even further, I am sure it would help improve the battery life tremendously.

Camera and Microphone
There's two cameras in the tablet, the front is 2.0MP and back is 5.0MP. Unsurprisingly both are terrible :). They work okay under perfect lighting but other than that you are better served using a cheap compact cameras. Since neither have autofocus, you are pretty much guaranteed a blurred picture everytime you use any of the two. The night mode works well and make the camera a tiny bit more usable under usual lighting.

Front camera auto mode.

Front camera night mode.

Rear camera auto mode.

Rear camera night mode.

The mic also works well in games such as Talking Tom and other "talking" games. Have yet to test it in Skype but I think it should work just as well there. It is an omni-directional microphone and is quite a sensitive one too. For example, if I just put it on a table and opened the Talking Tom application, it would detect voices even 2 meters away.

Speakers and Headphone Jack

So far everything is good enough. Now time for the bad news. The stereo speakers suck. There is no other way to put it. Sure theres two of them but like I said in the Xiaomi M1S review, its better to have one good speaker than two crappy ones. The only good thing about them is the physical separation and during games such as Shine Runner it does add a little to the gaming experience.

If that didn't put you off then read on for a more detailed description. By default, the speakers get acceptably loud but is nowhere remarkable. Bass as you expect is non-existent so the sound is as tinny as it can be. It also crackled at highest volume BUT the biggest issue for me is that whenever a low frequency sound is sent to the speaker, the volume will dip to almost the lowest setting so much so that its very annoying. It sounds kinda like when you enable Loudness Equalization on windows so at first I thought it was a software issue.

So I tried the TNT ROM despite the already excellent factory ROM installed. And the result? Still the same but the good thing is TNT included an equalizer application for equalizing sounds globally. To get even a hardly acceptable sound output, I had to tone down all the frequencies below 2kHz so that the volume will remain consistent during playback but there is no way around the crackling at the top range.

After giving up on that, I thought hey, I can always use my headphones for better sound. Surely they can't mess this one up, can they? Well, they did. I don't know why the audio aspects of this particular tablet sucks, or maybe I got a defective unit but I actually have to play around with the connector so that the tablet will correctly use the connected headphones. If I put the jack all the way in, there will be no sound played through the headphones and the only way to use headphones is to put it halfway in. Annoying...

As if thats not enough, the audio quality through the headphone jack is horrible. It sounds horribly compressed and dynamic range is also greatly reduced. Why oh why Pipo?? Why would you use cheap DAC for a tablet marketed for its sound? I can never understand this decision.

In short, if my tablet is a common representative of all the other Pipo M3, stay away from it if you want good quality audio. It is unacceptably bad.

Battery Life

Now back into positive note, battery life of this tablet is very good provided that you let the wifi turns off during sleep. I have been using the tablet for slightly more than 2 weeks and during standby it barely uses any battery. During the days when I actually have time to play with it, I can get through a day of usage on one charge. If you are a heavy user then expect about 12hr of usage before having to recharge the tablet. This is one of the reasons why I didn't ship the tablet back.

Charging from 5% took about 3hrs using the supplied charger. Oh and another positive point for Pipo is that the included charger is of higher quality then what other manufacturers typically provide. I cannot comment on the quality of the power delivery mechanisms but somehow I can feel that this one is among the better ones. Usually I would not use the manufacturer provided chargers when it comes to Chinese tablets and would rather buy a separate charger but this time there is no such need. One indication of the quality is the charging pin doesn't budge during usage. The pins of chargers from Ramos and Cube will actually move around quite a bit when you are trying to insert it into the tablets but this one stays put. The charging socket on the tablet is also excellent. You would have to push it in until there is a satisfying click and a red light besides it will light up.

One slightly negative point is that if you charge the device from 0% and use it at the same time, you will sometimes get random phantom touches but I found that all you have to do is let the tablet charge for a minute or two with the screen turned off and then you can use it normally. Perhaps the charger cannot handle kickstarting the battery and powering the tablet at the same time but really, I don't think this is an issue. To avoid it all together just simply avoid depleting the battery till 0%.

RK3066
General Performance

Using the factory installed firmware, the experience is usually smooth but often there are stutters when using the included launcher but was never really a big issue. The experience under TNT ROM is miles better where the launcher is buttery smooth. Surfing using Chrome is good most of the times but will still lags at pages with flash contents.

Surfing is quite pleasant on the tablet as it is not too heavy, the screen is big enough to comfortably click on things without putting much effort and the resolution is high enough to fit most websites. I don't think it is wise to use the RK3066 on higher than 720p resolution to be honest as the memory requirements would be extremely high. During heavy usage, the tablet does warms up a little but nothing major. It gets a little warm to touch and I think the big <10" body helps here.

Sunspider (Browser)

Sunspider (Chrome)

I have no idea why Chrome downloaded from the Play store have different score. Perhaps it is not optimized for the RK3066?

Rightware Browsermark (Browser)

GLBenchmark

I don't know why but I cannot seem to run the newer HD benchmarks. It just wouldn't run onscreen or offscreen.

Basemark Taiji

Linpack

Antutu

Comparison with other SOCs

It is no surprise that the RK3066 is one fast SOC so the fact that it trumps the AML8726-MX is nothing new. I look forward to see how it would compare to new generation quadcore SOCs like the Freescale IMX6Q, Allwinner A31 and even the Huawei K3V2.

Somehow my tablet scores lower on the graphic related benchmarks than other devices with RK3066 reported online but still managed to end up the fastest among all the SOCs I have tested before in the graphics department.

Wireless Performance
Wireless reception is actually pretty good but as always nothing remarkable. Although it connects fine to a far away access points, it will intermittently disconnect so I cannot rate it as excellent but it is in no way disappointing either.

Conclusion

Other than the audio aspects of the tablet, this is actually quite a good product from Pipo but ultimately I cannot recommend this device. If you are willing to live by the horrible sounds then by all means, you can consider buying this tablet. Personally, I liked the tablet enough (good screen, good battery life, good build quality) that I want to keep it and just buy some bluetooth speakers and bluetooth audio receiver to connect to my headphones but I can't help but think that there must be other Chinese tablet which is better than this. I have tested tablets from SmartQ, Ramos, Cube, Pipo, Ainol and Onda and the only ones that stand out as having good potential are Onda and Pipo. I look forward to test tablets from other manufacturers especially Teclast, Ployer and Hyundai.

Cube U30GT-M and Ainol Flame/Fire

2012-12-25T02:35:00.001-08:00

Hey guys!

I am back in my home country now for the winter holidays and that means I get to play with the Cube U30GT-Mini and Ainol Flame tablets I ordered for my family before! Or so I thought.. Before I go on, I must say that I can only speak for the units that I have. I bought 2 Ainol Flame and 2 Cube U30GT-Mini so whether or not that is a fair representative of the devices as a whole, I will leave that for you to decide.

Out of the four devices, only 1 is actually working right now and that is one of the Ainol Flame. According to the users, the Flames were fine devices for any kind of usage. However, about after a month of abuse, one of the Ainol's charger gave up and simply stopped working so both Flames have to share one charger which is quite an inconvenience.

Even worse, my niece accidentally dropped one of the Flames from the sofa and that broke the screen. To be honest, our sofa was not even that high and many electronics have fall from this height before but the Flame was the first to ever be permanently damaged by such incidents.

If you say that this has nothing to do with the tablets themselves, fair enough but I honestly won't be buying any Ainol products in the future. And now for the Cubes....

Neither of the Cubes are actually working right now. Both are doomed to be a paper weight constantly reminding myself why I should test a devices myself first before recommending it to others. According to the owners, both of the Cubes constantly freezes during usage so much so that it was unusable. One of the Cube U30GT-Mini was damaged because the charger's pin melted and permanently blocked the charging hole. How that happened, I have no idea. The other Cube was still working when I came back but somehow suddenly decided to brick itself. The screen was also so heavily scratched although obviously the owner didn't really get to use it much. The speaker apparently only worked for a while and after that making horrible clicking sounds when used so is really useless. Battery life? 2000mAh. Enough said :)

Although I was very disappointed, that didn't stop me from investigating further on why these Cubes freeze during usage. First I tried different custom/factory ROMs and managed to unbrick it. However, the freezes still occur under all the different ROMs so I concluded that the problem must be the hardware. Next, I tried taping all the exposed wires and switches in the inside just in case something caused the tablet to short-circuit but that failed too..

Finally, I tried using some desk fans to cool off the back of the tablet (with the cover opened) and guess what, it worked! Not only did it booted correctly, I also managed to download a few games before it finally freezes when I accidentally covered the SOC with my hand causing it to overheat. Oh well, at least now I know what the culprit is; overheating.

So now I am waiting for some copper shims and aluminium tapes from China to arrive so that I can try to repair the still chargable Cube. How such devices were even allowed to be released to the general public, I have no idea but lesson learnt; no more purchasing Cube products in the foreseeable future.

Conclusion? I might review the Ainol Flame if I managed to replace the broken screen but there is no way in heaven I would even post a full review on the Cube U30GT-Mini. That thing is so disappointing that I am not even willing to spend time and write a proper review for it. This does not mean I am forbidding you to buy these products but just consider yourself warned.

PS: I am currently reviewing two other tablets namely the Pipo Max M3 and Onda V712. Although the devices are not perfect by any means, I also have NOT encountered any serious issues so far but I will keep using them for the next few days just to make sure. Stay tuned!

Regards,
YS.

Poll!

2012-10-28T20:11:00.003-07:00

Dear readers,

I have a small favour to ask from you guys.
What device (be it a tablet or a phone) would you guys want me to review next?
Currently, there is no development in the Chinese market which excite me so this time it is up to you guys to decide what I shall review next.

Post your answer(s) on the comment section below. Remember to just submit your comment once as I would have to moderate all the comments.

Xiaomi M1S / Mi-One S Review!

2012-10-18T14:01:00.000-07:00

Xiaomi M1S Review

Why

There's a lot of fuss going about Xiaomi and I wanted to try them out to see if they are worth the hype. Their camera is also said to be very capable.

Specifications

CPU: Qualcomm MSM8260 Dual Core Cortex A9 at 1.7GHz
GPU: Adreno 220
RAM: 1GB DDR3
OS: Android 4.0.3
Firmware: MIUIAndroid 2.10.12
Internal Memory: 1GB Apps, 3GB internal.
Screen Size: 4.0" ASV Sharp TFT
Screen Resolution: 854 x 480.
Webcam: 8.0MP BSI Rear and 2MP Front.
Battery: 1880-1930 mAH Li-Ion.

Cost

I bought it off Aliexpress.com from the seller Shenzhen Nonstop Technology Co., Ltd.
for USD310 with free DHL shipping using my USD10 coupon :). I love coupons.

Packaging

The phone came with a small and simple box. It looks like its made of cardboard. Maybe Xiaomi is trying to be green here?

The phone in its full glory.

Inside the box was one battery, one charger and a USB cable. However, my supplier also gave me an extra 3-plug charger, a blue plastic cover and a brown pouch. All these for free :)

The phone with the free plastic cover installed.

Build Quality

Overall, this phone feels good. Heck, it feels like a premium phone compared to my previous ThL W3+. The back is plastic but is matte instead of being a glossy plastic like the ThL. No creaking anywhere and you can just feel its a solid device once you pick it up.

The front is just the screen, three capacitive buttons and the front camera.

The back.

8.0MP camera and the Xiaomi logo.

The loudspeaker.

The side compared to the ThL. Top is the M1S.

The bottom. Top is M1S.

Another side with the volume buttons and a dedicated camera button.

Top is M1S.

Top parts with 3.5mm headphone jack and power button.

Comparing thickness to ThL W3+. The M1S is slightly thinner but it feels MUCH better in hands.

Screen

Overall, the screen is a good screen. However, from the specs we know that this is unfortunately not an IPS screen which is odd considering this phone ~USD70 more than the ThL W3+. The most obvious change from the ThL is the colour, it looks washed out and not as vibrant.

Head on, and this is the best case scenario of the M1S, the screen is very bright (brighter than the ThL) but even from this perspective the colour is not as vibrant.

Viewing from the side, the colours becomes worse. Note that this is slightly exaggerated as in reality although the colour does change, they are still visible and not as 'white' as in this picture.

When you don't compare the two phones side by side, the M1S screen does not look terribly bad.

Fortunately, the touchscreen is a pleasure to use. Typing on this phone is somehow much more easier as I somehow managed to type fast on the same keyboard with less typo than on the ThL.

Camera

*Taking these pictures were much easier on the M1S due to the dedicated camera button. Often the images from the ThL turned out to be blurry as I have to click on the screen to snap a picture. Why can't all smartphones have dedicated camera buttons!

Rear Camera

Indoors Performance

Without flash and plenty of light, the camera performed fine although a bit too noisy for me. The image on the right is from the M1S and on the left is the ThL. Colour is also less vibrant on the M1S but is much more closer to real life. Subjectively, the ThL also appears less noisy to me.

This is a 100% crop view of the above image. The texts are still visible and what's more impressive is that we can still see the small manufacturer's code on the bottom. Compare this with the one from ThL on the left where the small writing cannot be read at all. So while you do lose the vibrant colour, you do gain details going from the ThL to the M1S.

Performance with flash in total darkness is excellent. The flash is as bright as the ThL and can lit up a medium sized room. Curiously, in this type of setting, the M1S performs much better in terms of colour compared to the ThL while still being more detailed.

This is in with no light source other than the notebook on the back. Just for fun :)

Outdoors Performance
To test this, I took a stroll in the city and snapped a few pictures. I did not bring my ThL along so no comparison shots here.

Front Camera

Like before, under well lit condition the M1S have more details but less vibrant colour than the ThL. For Skyping purposes both are good enough.

Speakers and Headphone jack

I tried to record the audio from a fixed distance using my notebook's internal mic and as expected the results is horrible but I am still going to upload them :). Basically, the loudspeaker is awesome! Yes, it is unfortunately a mono speaker but one good speaker is better than 2 crap ones.

ThL Screen-up
http://www.mediafire.com/?mka9rtn5ws0jjaa

M1S Screen-up
http://www.mediafire.com/?gr9ucnanxm8cz18

ThL Screen-down
http://www.mediafire.com/?1wmqc2989h89gw4

M1S Screen-down
http://www.mediafire.com/?gn2u17ecnn79g73

Note: All these recordings were done on a wooden table.

The speaker on the M1S is surprisingly warm and the mid-bass is audible which is not something you can say about lots of phones nowadays. In my opinion, the speaker of the M1S is way better than those on the Samsung Galaxy S2 and S3. While these Samsung phones do produce louder audio but I find them to be sharp and harsh. Bass is also non-existent. Overall, a great job by Xiaomi!

However, the M1S is not perfect as the output on the headphone jack is clearly bass-heavy and while the volume is ample, the ThL is able to produce louder output on the same headphone. It is still acceptable, especially more so if you listen to bass heavy genres but if you like your mids to be forward then you would have to use media players with equaliser instead of the preinstalled player.

Battery Life

It took ~3hours to fully charge the battery from 5% capacity using the supplied charger which is rated at 1A.
Generally, I would have to say that the M1S's have an acceptable battery life. It is a little bit longer (say 1hr or so more) than the ThL but you would definitely have to charge it at the end of the day after a heavy usage.

To be more specific, I usually charge my phone while I sleep so that when I woke up (around 8am in the morning) it would be fully charged. I would use my phone throughout the day with the wireless always turned on and the brightness on automatic setting. This includes browsing, constant checking of emails, messaging, listening to musics, watching Youtube videos and some brief phone calls. Once I get home around 7PM, I would still have around 35% battery left. I once forgot to charge my phone only to find out that it have around 25% left the next morning. So technically, it is possible to get more than a day of battery life but that would mean that you have to charge your phone the next day.

What is good though is that the battery percentage decreases linearly unlike the ThL which will drain like crazy once it reaches 15%. Also, what I have noticed is that the battery on the M1S does not deplete as fast as the ThL when you do CPU/GPU intensive operations like playing games, browsing and viewing Youtube videos. The M1S does not even heat up doing all these. However, keep in mind that the MTK6577 was meant for budget phones so it is not really fair to compare these two but unfortunately I only have the data for these two SOCs and nothing else.

Wireless Performance

While I know that there are applications out there which can objectively measure the signal strength of wireless networks on Android devices, I still think that the best way to test the Wi-Fi performance is to actually use it. There have been times where the signal strength reported were strong enough but the device is still unable to use the wireless network and this might be due to the high noise level (due to factors such as terrible internal shieldings or bad antenna placement).

I used the M1S around my flat (I live in the basement) and the walls here are very thick ( two bricks thick) so sometimes the ThL W3+ does disconnect in places such as the corner of my room. The ThL phone's wifi is honestly quite good and it is understandable as to why it sometimes disconnect in this case.

Fortunately, the M1S wireless module is better than the ThL! It works at spots where the ThL used to struggle to stay connected although it shows just 1 bar of signal. Again, kudos to Xiaomi!

GPS

To test this, I tried to get a GPS fix indoors and then went out for a walk to test the GPS outdoors.
Understandably, since I live in the basement floor, I could not get a GPS fix at all. However, once I went up to the ground floor, the M1S was able to get a fix although you might have to wait a minute or two.

Outdoors, the phone performed much better taking less than a minute to get a proper GPS fix. It was refreshing to see that it just works without any efforts from my part.

Conclusion: The GPS works.

MSM8260
General Performance and MIUI
The phone is so smooth! I have yet to experience any stutters while using it but then again the ROM installed is a heavily modified version of Android. At first, it was kinda weird not having a menu button, one where you can see all your modified apps. Instead, in MIUI all your apps are shown on the homescreen. While this may/may not improve your productivity, I find it weird at first but after using it for a while, the decision kinda makes sense. One downside of this is that if you need to install any widgets, the widget app icons will also be shown on the homescreen as if it is an actual app and you can't remove them either unless you uninstall them.

Although I am still discovering the features of MIUI, I must admit that I already like it. Messages comes up as notifications where you can reply to them straight away. The default music player automatically find the album art and lyrics of your songs and the lyrics will be synchronized with the music currently playing making it easier for you to sing along. The themes is one of the major selling point of MIUI in my opinion as it totally changes your device. I cannot possibly explain this in words so I might upload a video later just to show how different the themes in MIUI are compared to the stock ICS.

Performance

Sunspider 0.9.1

Rightware Browsermark

GLBenchmark 2.1.4

Basemark Taiji

Linpack

Antutu

Comparison with other SOCs

-To be updated-

Call Quality

The phone worked fine during the few brief calls I made but I can not objectively test whether the noise cancelling features works as I do not have the proper equipments. Maybe someday I will actually invest in them but till then, all that I can say is "You can make phone calls with this phone."

Issues

I found out that the M1S's camera cannot focus properly in the dark if you are trying to focus on a white object. Somehow it just won't bother to try and change the focus but once you change it to objects of other colours, it will focus fine. No idea why this is so.

Also the included Bluetooth module is pretty slow. While I can't give any actual throughput numbers, the ThL sent the same 9MB file in less than 1min where it took the M1S about 2mins to complete the same task. It was said that the included bluetooth module in the M1S is version 2.0 and I think that is true.

Other than these two issues, the M1S is one admirable device. There is no real hardware problems, no overheating (or rather no heating issues) at all even if you are using Youtube or gaming. GPS works. Camera is good. Speaker is good. Touch screen is good. Play store works. An almost golden device compared to other Chinese phones I must say.

Conclusion

I love this phone! The premium feel of the back, good loudspeaker and a polished UI sets it apart from most of other Chinese phones. The ROM will also be updated regularly at MIUIAndroid.com so any issues will most likely be fixed in few weeks time. Although the camera did not meet my expectations, it is undeniably still a good one. Other downsides are the lower than 720p resolution, non-IPS screen and dated bluetooth module used.

Considering the price, which is less than GBP200, it would be really hard to find mobiles with the kind of feature set the M1S phone have unless you are willing to buy used ones. If you looking for an Android phone and this phone fits your budget, I have no trouble recommending this phone as both the hardware and software aspects are as good (if not better) than the phones made by mainstream manufacturers at this price range.

Hmmm... Xiaomi Mi-2...........

Regards,
YS.

Xiaomi M1S review coming soon!

2012-10-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know that I have received my Xiaomi M1S and is in the process of finishing off the review. Still got things like GPS, battery life and microphone to test so hopefully I will get all the data by tomorrow.

As a sneak peek, here's a picture I took using the M1S:

Spoiler alert: I love this phone!

Till then,
YS.

Chinese Superphones!

2012-09-29T11:02:00.001-07:00

Going back to the UK in 2 days time and unfortunately the tablets are still in China so won't be able to play around with them at all. Well, on the bright side I can sell my ThL phone on eBay and buy something else to review! How I wish I can review phones for free :)). One can always dream.

Seeing all the new chinese smartphones makes it difficult on deciding which phone to buy next. So this post serves as a way for me to objectively decide which phone I should buy next. Meet the contenders!

1) XiaoMi Mi2

SOC: Snapdragon APQ8064 1.5GHz
GPU: Adreno 320
Screen: 4.3" IPS 1280x720
RAM: 2GB
ROM: 16GB/32GB
OS: Android 4.1, Jelly Bean with MIUI interface
Camera: 2.0MP(Front) and 8.0MP(Rear)
Battery: 2000mAh
SD-card: No
Retail Price without shipping: USD 430 (16GB)

Reasons to buy:

Quad core
Supposedly good camera
MIUI so expect excellent software support
Biggest RAM capacity among all current superphones. Same as the new Galaxy Note.
Next generation GPU.

2) Lenovo lephone K860

SOC: Samsung Exynos 4412 1.4GHz
GPU: Mali-400 MP
Screen: 5.0" AH-IPS 1280x720
RAM: 1GB
ROM: 8GB
OS: Android 4.0
Camera: 2.0MP(Front) and 8.0MP(Rear)
Battery: 2250mAh
SD-card: Yes
Retail Price without shipping: USD 448

Reasons to buy:

Quad core, same as Galaxy S III
SD Card slot
5.0" screen
Lenovo is a huge company so expect quality control to be better than competition
SD Card slot

3) Beidou Little Pepper Tegra3

SOC: NVIDIA Tegra 3 1.5GHz
GPU: ULP Geforce at 520MHz
Screen: 4.65" IPS 1280x720
RAM: 1GB
ROM: 4GB
OS: Android 4.0
Camera: 0.3MP(Front) and 8.0MP(Rear)
Battery: 1630mAh
SD-card: Yes
Retail Price without shipping: USD 400

Reasons to buy:

Quad core
SD Card slot
Can play Tegra 3 exclusive titles without any tweaks.

4) ZTE Grand Era U985

SOC: NVIDIA Tegra 3 1.5GHz
GPU: ULP Geforce at 520MHz
Screen: 4.5" IPS 1280x720
RAM: 1GB
ROM: 4GB
OS: Android 4.0
Camera: 1.3MP(Front) and 8.0MP(Rear)
Battery: 1800mAh
SD-card: Yes
Retail Price without shipping: USD 385

Reasons to buy:

Quad core
SD Card slot
Can play Tegra 3 exclusive titles without any tweaks.

5)XiaoMi 1S

SOC: Snapdragon MSM8260 1.7GHz
GPU: Adreno 220
Screen: 4.0" IPS 854x480
RAM: 1GB
ROM: 4GB
OS: Android 4.0 with MIUI interface
Camera: 2.0MP(Front) and 8.0MP(Rear)
Battery: 1930mAh
SD-card: Yes
Retail Price without shipping: USD 350 (16GB)

Reasons to buy:

Supposedly good camera
MIUI so expect excellent software support
SD Card slot
The fastest dual core SOC available

6)Tianyu K-Touch Treasure V8 II

SOC: NVIDIA Tegra 3 1.5GHz
GPU: ULP Geforce at 520MHz
Screen: 4.5" ASV 1280x720
RAM: 1GB
ROM: 16GB
OS: Android 4.0
Camera: 1.0MP(Front) and 8.0MP(Rear)
Battery: 1820mAh
SD-card: Yes
Retail Price without shipping: USD 400

Reasons to buy:

Quad core
SD Card
Press release says it has good speakers. Sometimes referred to as a music phone.

7) Huawei Ascend D1 Quad XL

SOC: HiSilicon K3V2 1.4GHz Quad Core
GPU: 16 cores unknown GPU
Screen: 4.5" IPS+ 1280x720
RAM: 1GB
ROM: 8GB
OS: Android 4.0
Camera: 1.3MP(Front) and 8.0MP(Rear)
Battery: 2600mAh
SD-card: Yes
Retail Price without shipping: USD 500

Reasons to buy:

Unique to Huawei quad core SOC.
Marketted as having extra long battery life thanks to combination of in-house developed software and hardware by Huawei. They are using Apple's approach (having total control over their device).
Huawei is an establised brand so should have good quality control.
Rear camera is backside illuminated should should take acceptable pictures indoors.
Confirmed to have Gorilla glass to protect the screen.

Thoughts

Personally, I am only interested in some of these devices.

I WILL buy the XiaoMi M1S to check out the camera first.

If it is as good as they said it would be then I would sell it and buy the Mi2 :)
If not, I will sell it and buy a Nokia Lumia 920 on contract haha.

Will you guys be interested in the Lumia 920 review? Doubt it :P

If somehow I become rich, I would review the K-Touch Treasure V8 II primarily to test out the speakers and the Ascend D1 Quad XL to test just how the in-house SOC fares compared to the others.

So, in short expect a review on the Xiaomi M1S in the coming 2 weeks :).

Till then.

Regards,
YS.

New tablets on their way!

2012-09-22T16:30:00.001-07:00

After playing around with some of the Chinese gadgets I bought (ThL W3+ and Ramos W17Pro), my family is starting to accept the fact that not all Chinese-brand products are bad. As I told them, it is simply a matter of choosing the good ones among the many bad ones.

So yesterday, my sister wanted to buy cheap Android tablets for her and another one for her daughter and she entrusted me to make the decision :))).

As you all know, I have yet to personally test any RK3066 device and I got all the benchmark scores from other sources which are of course reliable but I still want to gather the data first hand. Without further ado, here are the two tablets I ordered and the reasons why I chose them:

Ainol Novo7 Fire/Flame

After playing with all the different form factors of the tablets in my house (there are lots of branded tablets in my house, unfortunately. Mostly from Apple and Samsung), she decided that she likes the Ramos W17Pro 7" form factor the best. Oh the irony :). This is the reason why I focused my search on 7" tablets.

She also surfs a lot so I decided she would love the 1280*800 resolution. And finally, the most important factor for her is battery life. Having personally tested the AML8726-MX, I know that it is a capable SOC but I really wanted to try the RK3066 however I also know that she will most likely not realise the different performances of the two as both will deliver similar user experience. So, in the end I chose a tablet which fits all the criteria above with the highest battery capacity. And that happens to be the Ainol Novo7 Fire/Flame.

Okay, to be honest, it is not like there are that many choices anyway. My search led me to 3 different tablets:

1) Ainol Novo7 Fire/Flame. (AMLogic, 5000mAh)

2) PIPO U1 (Rockchip, 3750mAh)

3) Onda V712 (AMLogic, 4500mAh)

I know that battery capacity is not the only factor which will affect battery life but considering all these three tablets have similar display panels (all 1280*800 and IPS) it is the only objective way I can think of to blindly guess the battery life. Oh, and another reason why I leaned towards this tablet is that some reviews mentioned that it has good speakers! You know I can't resist such claims :) That and the fact that my sister actually likes the design. I also am quite a fan of the aluminium back.

Here are the specifications:

Screen: 7" 1280x800 IPS Capacitive Screen.

SOC: AMLogic 8726-MX 1.5GHz.

RAM: 1GB.

ROM: 16GB.

Camera: 2MP Front and 5MP Rear (with AF and flash).

Battery: 5000mAh

Other features: Bluetooth, SD card slot, improved wi-fi antenna, ambient light sensor and an HDMI port!

I honestly can't wait for this one to arrive. Great design, great specifications but will it be as great in the real world? Will update you readers once it arrives!

Cube U30GT Mini

Having had to settle with the AMLogic solution before, I was determined to find a tablet with the Rockchip SOC this time instead. As this is for my niece, her needs are different. She does not care about the resolution so no 720p screen is required. Another requirement is that it must cost less than USD150 after shipping. That narrow things down to a very few and only this one caught my eyes. Meet the Cube U30GT Mini. Finally, I get to play with a RK3066 device!

Here are the specifications:

Screen: 7" 1024x600 IPS Capacitive Screen.

SOC: Rockchip RK3066 1.6GHz

RAM: 1GB.

ROM: 16GB.

Camera: 2MP Front and 2MP Rear

Battery: 3000mAh

Other features: Bluetooth, SD card slot, wifi b/g/n, an ambient light sensor and a mini HDMI port.

They should arrive within the next 5 days. They better arrive by then cause I will be leaving back to the UK and that means I won't get the chance to play with these babies :(

Thats all the ramble I can write today, till next time.

Regards,

YS.

Fixing Incompatible Apps on ThL W3+ using Custom ROMs

2012-09-20T03:49:00.000-07:00

So, I have been receiving many comments regarding the state of apps such as Viber, LINE and Google Calendar among others on the ThL W3+. I am sorry if your comments take a long time to be approved, I usually ignore the email notifications as I have been receiving some spam comments lately. So without further ado, let's get to the main point; how to fix the incompatibilities.

Warning/Disclaimer: This tutorial will completely wipe your phone so backup your data on your own. I am in no way responsible for any data loss and/or any damages done to your device. I have been reading the posts at forum.china-iphone.ru using Google Translate and there have been some reports of screen issues regarding the brightness/flickering. Personally, I have successfully done this procedure to my phone and everything was fine :).

This tutorial is basically a tutorial on how to flash a custom firmware (obtained from the aforementioned forum) by ink08. You can read more on this firmware here and even donate to his paypal account.

1) Backup everything you need from your phone to your computer. Make sure your phone have at least 50% of battery left.

2) Download this. It is basically a modified version of ModRecovery so that the phone can accept non-factory produced files. Rename this to update.zip.

3) Download this custom firmware.

4) Put the files into your phone's internal storage. Do NOT extract the files in the zip files. Just simply copy the two zip files.

5) On your phone, go to Settings, About and then click on the Reboot Recovery.

6) Once your phone displays an android icon with a red symbol in the middle, use the up/down volume buttons to navigate to Install zip from sdcard and then click the power button once to enter.

7) Select Choose zip from sdcard and the select the update.zip file you downloaded from step 2.

8) After it has done flashing, select Go back and then select Reboot system now.

9) Once it rebooted, repeat steps 5 to 6. However, this time choose the zip file you downloaded from step 3.

10) Reboot the phone by selecting Go back and Reboot system now.

Optional: I highly suggest you to format your phone storage at this stage to prevent any errors in the future. Make sure you have everything backed up somewhere else! You can do this through Settings, Storage and then Format phone storage.

And that is it! You can now customise your phone at will and Google Calendar will be working straight away. It is also rooted so you don't have to root it again. Viber and LINE can be installed straight away from the market.

One thing I noticed is that somehow the brightness of my device is a little lower which for me is a welcomed side effect as I found the lowest brightness before to be too bright. As always, if you have anything to ask post a comment below. Or if I helped you in anyway, donate to my paypal account by using the Donate button on the top of this site (shameless promotion :D).

Regards,
YS.

Eid-ul-Fitr!

2012-08-22T03:06:00.000-07:00

This may come a little too late, but I just want to wish all my Muslim readers...

As some of you might have noticed, I am much slower to respond to your queries these days and that is because I have been busy with the Eid celebrations. I am also going to sit for an examination soon (in 10 days) so I shall be busy preparing for that as well.

Apologies for any late replies and do wish me luck for my examination!

Regards,

Updating the firmware on ThL W3+

2012-08-22T03:00:00.002-07:00

I noticed that there have been quite a demand on a tutorial on updating the ThL W3+ firmware. As I will not be active for the next two weeks (due to this) so I have decided to write one :). Hope this will help somebody out there. And again, do not expect me to reply to your comments instantaneously as I will not be able to do so.

1) Download the latest firmware here and make sure you have at least 50% of battery left. Updating the firmware will also erase all the contents of the phone so make sure to back up all your data.

2) Extract these two files:

3) Open the SP Flash Tool folder and run the Flash_tool.exe

4) Once executed, click the Scatter Loading button and select the file as shown below.

5) After that click on the Download button. Just click yes on any prompt messages. Now connect your phone using the supplied USB and turn if off. Then, click on the power button briefly once. Do NOT hold the power button. Just press it for a short time.

6) A new device will be detected briefly (MediaTek Preloader USB VCOM Port). If it failed to install the driver, follow the steps numbered 1 to 7 (skip step 2) from this tutorial. There is also a bundled driver which came with the firmware so if everything else failed, try the bundled driver.

It should then start updating the firmware and shortly after you will have an updated firmware (dated 06/08). I do not really know the changes from the previous version so if anybody realised any differences before and after updating do comment below.

Disclaimer: I shall not be held responsible for anything bad which might result from following the steps above. This is exactly what I did to my phone and everything went well so hopefully yours should be fine too :).

PS: Here is the tutorial on how to root your ThL W3+ phone if you need it. Updating the firmware will unroot your phone.

Regards,

YS.

Rooting the ThL W3+

2012-08-14T23:36:00.001-07:00

Rooting

As I mentioned in the review, although the Play Store come preinstalled in the ThL W3+ it was not working at all. So, as my first attempt to fix it I scoured online for an updated firmware. It wasn't easy as I do not speak/read Chinese but nonetheless I managed to find it. The main site appears to be thl.cc where you can check for latest firmware and support but everything is in Chinese. However the new firmware does not help as the Play store still wasn't working. So, the next step I tried was rooting the ThL and replaced/install the required Google apps. Guess what, it worked :).

The following steps show how to root the ThL W3+.

1) Download the USB drivers for MTK6577 here.

2) Download the UnlockRoot software here.

3) On your phone, go to Setting, Developer options and tick the USB debugging option.

4) Extract both the USB drivers and install UnlockRoot.

5) Connect the phone to your USB port. By now, windows will try to find the driver for the phone and will fail. So, open up your Device Manager (Click on Start button, type Run and then type devmgmt.msc and then enter).

6) There will be one item with a yellow tick on it named MTK65XX.... device. Right click on this and click Update Driver Software.

7) Point the wizard to the driver's folder you just downloaded. Make sure to tick the Always trust... option.

8) Open the UnlockRoot, click on Root and then select the ThL W3+ device.

9) If it asks you if you want to re-root just click Yes.

10) Now you device should be fully rooted! To check just look for a Superuser app on your menu. If there is one then you have successfully rooted your phone. Otherwise, comment on below for more help.

Fixing Play Store

Without rooting, you cannot get Play store or any other Google apps to work on the phone. This 'may' be due to all the other relevant services not being installed on the device. Follow the following steps to fix this.

1) Download Google Apps archive from here courtesy of CyanogenMod team.

2) Extract it and inside it go to system folder and copy the whole app folder to your phone.

3) Download ES File Explorer from here. Click on the first selection.

4) Install the ES File Explorer, open it, click on the options button on the phone (next to the home button) and click Settings.

5) Tick on Up to Root, Root Explorer and Mount File System.

6) Copy the app folder from step 2 and paste it to the system folder (overwrite the app folder).

7) Once done copying, open up the /system/app/ folder and install GoogleLoginService.apk, GoogleServicesFramework.apk and finally Vending.apk.

8) Reboot your device and voila, the Play store should be working now! If not, again do comment below.

PS: Here is a tutorial on how to update your phone's firmware.

Regards,

YS.

THL W3+ and MTK6577 review!

2012-08-14T02:47:00.000-07:00

ThL W3+ Review

UPDATES
Click HERE to update the firmware.
Click HERE to root and fix Play Store.
Click HERE to fix Viber, LINE etc using Custom ROM.

Why
Because of the dual-core SOC. There is little information on it (in English) on the net so I was curious. Curiosity kills. And it makes me broke.

Specifications
CPU: MediaTek MTK6577 Dual-Core Cortex A9 at 1.0GHz
GPU: PowerVR SGX 531 Ultra
RAM: 1GB
OS: Android 4.0.3
Firmware: 06/08
Internal Memory: 1GB Apps, 2GB internal.
Screen Size: 4.5"
Screen Resolution: 1280x720.
Webcam: 8.0MP Rear and 2MP Front.
Battery: 2000mAH Li-Ion.

Packaging

Small and compact box. I like the packaging, everything was simple and non-excessive.

There is a warranty card inside as well as a user manual in chinese. And of course, the phone. Looks like an iPhone at this angle.

The phone in terrible picture quality. Damn I need a proper camera.

Included were the USB cable, charger, in-ear headphones and 2 batteries. Thats two batteries! This was nowhere stated in Pandawill website so it was a pleasant surprise. Actually Pandawill also shipped one screen protector but I was so stupid that I ruined it with dusts hahaha.

Build Quality
The phone generally feels solid and does not in anyway feels cheap. However, I would have preferred a textured finish over the smooth surface but as it is, it is okay. I think I just need to adjust to the smooth feeling without feeling that it might fall off my hands anytime.

On the left side is the volume rocker. The buttons are responsive and there is enough feedback. No faults here.

On the top are the power button and the 3.5mm headphone jack.

On the right side is the Micro-USB port.

On the bottom is the microphone.

On the back are the two LED flash lights and the 8.0MP camera as well as the loudspeaker.

Screen

I wasn't aware of the type of the screen used in this phone so I was not really expecting anything great but boy oh boy, the screen is gorgeous. It is bright, vibrant and most importantly the viewing angle is fantastic. Considering all these quality, if one told me that this is an IPS screen I would have no trouble believing but without more information my guess is as good as yours. The important point to take away here is that the screen looks great. The high resolution (1280x720) definitely pays off.

Camera
Rear Camera

The camera autofocus function works well and it was quick (sub 2s).

Indoor with some sunlight, the quality is acceptable but using the automatic setting there is a lot of noise whenever there is not enough light. Colour also suffer under lack of lighting.

This is in almost total darkness with flash turned on. The flash lights are bright enough to light up a medium sized room. See what I mean about the noise and colour? The colour and noises are improved when there is enough light.

Outdoors, the camera did quite well. The images are vibrant and there is less noise compared to indoor images. However, the images are still rather noisy but is not really visible unless you view it in its original resolution. I only edited the license plate so the picture is otherwise unedited.

Front Camera
The front camera is surprisingly a decent performer.

The colour is rather dull and details are mostly lost but enough to make out what things you are looking at. It performs better under limited lighting than the rear camera so Skyping using this should be a non-issue.

Speakers and Headphone jack
The loudspeaker performs acceptably. It is as loud as most modern android smartphone. Nothing remarkable and it does not distort under full volume. There is no hints of bass and treble is bright bordering on being harsh but is no way fatiguing.

Using headphones to listen to musics, there is no audible static noise which is good. Musics played fine with plenty of volume and no obvious colouration. The dynamic range is good and to be honest one would be hard pressed to differentiate this to the integrated audio controllers used in most computers nowadays.

Battery Life
I have been using the phone for just a little bit more than a day so I will definitely need more time to test this section. So far the battery life looks promising. I used the phone with the wireless turned on, WhatsApp on the background with lots of texting and occasional browsing. It arrived with about 87% battery and after about 7 hours of heavy usage it still have about 37% left. This is a preliminary data as I will need to charge cycle the battery to know the definite performance so will update this after a day or two of proper usage.

Update:
After using this phone as my primary phone, I now have more data about the battery life. It generally lasts about 12hrs of browsing on wi-fi. If you do not use it that much and allow its screen to turn off periodically it can last about 15-16hrs.

As the charger is rated at 0.5A it is rather slow to fully charge the phone. Using this charger, it took me about 5hrs to completely charge the phone from 0%. On interesting thing I noted is that when the battery reached 15%, it will deplete faster than usual and reach 0% quicker than I expected. Also note that the provided charger's USB connector is longer than those of well known manufacturers. I tried to charge using a SIII charger only to find that its extremely loose although it does work if you let it stay stationary. Currently I used my N900 charger which is rated at 1.2A and it charges a little faster.

Wireless Performance
After being disappointed by the wireless performance of the Ramos W17Pro, it was refreshing to use the ThL W3+. It performs well under acceptable distance. My room is quite far from my main router so most phones cannot connect to it. Even some netbooks have trouble connecting but the ThL W3+ connects fine although it displays just one bar. The performance is at par with my Nokia N900 with much better battery life.

GPS
I do not really use this feature but using Google Maps, it accurately determined my location within 3s so I guess it works well as long as you have internet access. I have yet to use the GPS outdoors so cannot comment on that. In my opinion, the Google Location service is accurate enough that you only need internet connection anyway.

MTK6577
General Performance
Using the Android generally feels smooth with some stutters with there are lots of background apps. Browsing feels smooth and I cannot differentiate browsing using this or the Ramos speedwise. Of course, the experience is different (better) thanks to the higher resolution of the ThL. Embedded flash also works. The SOC plays all the different kinds of videos I have well. This is to be expected though as they have considerable experience in hardware accelerating the video decoding process.

Performance

Sunspider 0.9.1

Rightware Browsermark

GLBenchmark 2.1.4

Basemark Taiji

Linpack

Antutu

Comparison with other SOCs
-To be updated-

Call Quality
Although I have not used to phone to call anybody, the mic worked well during skype calls so I assumed that it will work just as well for normal phone calls.

The mic appears to be an omnidirectional mic hence picking up any nearby voice and noise in all direction. This is of course a matter of personal preference but I personally like it.

Issues
On the hardware side, the only issue is that it gets quite warm while using it for browsing. Otherwise, the hardware side is really good.

Now on the software side... The main issue is that when it arrived, the Play store did not work at all although it was preinstalled.. And to fix this I need to root the phone. And to root the phone I need the ADB drivers for the phone. Pandawill does not have information on this so I was really on my own. Thankfully, after some attempts I managed to root it and hence installed and fixed the Play store. There is also an updated firmware on the net (dated 06/08). If any of you need the instructions on how to do it, comment below and I will try to write up the tutorial as soon as possible.

Conclusion
To be honest, I was not expecting much from this SOC as rightfully so it performs just as I expected. The processors are fine really and is competitive with the other dual-core SOCs out there. The main weakness of the SOC and hence the phone is the GPU; it is too weak for the native resolution and is really weak for today's game. While most 3D games today perform fine (barely), I have no doubt it will nowhere be enough to support any new upcoming game.

As for the phone, I have to say that I am impressed. I guess it would be a much better performer if ThL would have used the TI OMAP 4430 but I guess that is asking too much considering the selling price. The features alone made it worth it. The issues can easily be fixed while the others are liveable. I have no trouble recommending this phone to anybody seeking for an entry level smartphone. Just don't have any high expectation on the performance as it really is just acceptable.

ThL W3+ (with MTK6577) ordered!

2012-08-05T21:04:00.001-07:00

Just a brief update, I have been contemplating whether or not to buy a phone with the MTK6577 inside.
Not because I need a phone but because I was curious of its performance :).

For those of you who still wonders what this chip is, it is designed by MediaTek which is currently the hottest chip designer in China. They are better associated with media players so when I first came across this chip my interest was piqued and then money started flowing out of my bank account.

There are scarce information about the real life performance of this chip which is really frustrating. The important details are:

Dual-core of Cortex A9 at 1GHz.
PowerVR SGX531 Ultra GPU.

The GPU side is really interesting as there is virtually no information on this particular model. The PowerVR SGX531 itself was introduced way back in 2008 so to say it is outdated is really an understatement. I really have no idea whether the Ultra suffix really exist or not but guess we will just have to wait till my phone arrive.

If you are interested in this SOC, these are some of the choices available. All of these phones have 1GB of RAM as I do not think 512MB is really practical in today's world.

Model:Amoi N820

Screen : 4.5" with resolution of 960*540.
Battery: 2000mAh

Model:ThL W3+

Screen : 4.5" with resolution of 1280*720.
Battery: 2000mAh

Model:Newman N1

Screen : 4.3" with resolution of 960*540.
Battery: 1700mAh

Model:Jiayu G3

Screen : 4.5" with resolution of 1280*720.
Battery: 2750mAh

Model: Huawei ShanYao 3G

Screen : 4.3" with resolution of 960*540.
Battery: 1930mAh

Looking at these specs, I really really really wanted to buy the Jiayu G3. Unfortunately, it is still not released (pre-order) with no firm release date. Infact, the only one currently available to purchase is the ThL W3+ and is the one I purchased. I really like the JiaYu G3 design but I guess the ThL W3+ will have to do for now. If the SoC perform satisfactorily, I will just sell the phone and get the JiaYu :P.

Review coming next week! Assuming DHL delivers it on time that is :).
Till then!

Regards,
YS.

Choosing the SOC for your next budget tablet.

2012-08-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

Nexus 7, Redefining Budget Tablets

With the recent announcement of Nexus 7 by Google, it is only fitting that I dedicate a post to help consumers in deciding which SOC is the best for their usage. Consumers in the USA should have less of a headache, after all the Nexus 7 8GB costs USD199 there so it makes little to no sense why you should settle on anything else especially on unknown chinese tablets. Unfortunately, for the rest of the world the decision making is not as simple.

In the UK the Nexus 7 8GB costs at least GBP199 and that is approximately USD312! In Australia the same device costs AUS319 (~USD335) and MYR868(~USD277) in Malaysia. Clearly, those unknown Chinese tablets still worth considering for budget conscious consumers outside US.

The Contenders

If you currently still undecided on which SOC to settle on, there are about 6 SOCs embedded in the tablets which I think are worthy of consideration. On this day and time, you should NEVER settle on single core devices. So, the SOCs of my choice are as listed followed by their specifications.

Tegra 2,
Qualcomm APQ8860,
TI OMAP 4430/4460,
AML8726-MX,
RK3066 and
Tegra 3 T30L as used in all the Nexus 7 tablets.

However, I would advise against buying Tegra 2 and APQ8660 devices simply because they are too outdated. Unless you can get them with a very CHEAP price, say less than USD100 otherwise stay away. The main reason I included them here is to show just how much the performance have increased since the Tegra 2 era.

Benchmarks
CPU

Please note that I do not have any devices with RK3066 and T30L so I stole the numbers from many sources online. The T30L scores were taken mainly from Anandtech.com and the RK3066 scores from the slatedroid.com forum. I will list my sources in the References section later.

These benchmarks primarily stresses the CPU with the exception of AnTuTu as it tests all the components and combines them to get an overall score. The scores have been normalized so that the T30L scores represent 100% performance. Single threaded performance varies between the SOCs with Tegra 2 having 76% on average of Tegra 3 single threaded performance and on the other end RK3066 having 100%.

It is interesting to see that RK3066 actually beats T30L on many CPU bound benchmarks like SunSpider and BrowserMark. However, none can challenge the raw power of the 4 A9 cores in T30L when it comes to multi-threaded performance. The RK3066 only possess 61% of the multi-threaded performance of T30L while Tegra 2 only have 49%.

Overall, if we were to believe the AnTuTu benchmark score, the Tegra 2, APQ8660 and OMAP 4430 performs similarly having ~60% of the T30L performance. The AML8726-MX improves this by providing about 72% of the T30L performance and finally the RK3066 with about 89% of the T30L performance. All of this is to be expected as T30L is the only quad cores SOC in the list. However, once we get to the GPU benchmarks it is a totally different story.

GPU

*Both Egypt and Pro tests were offscreen test so the native resolutions of the specific devices should not have mattered/affected the scores much.

The quad core Mali 400MP4 in RK3066 really rocks! We all know the ULP Geforce GPU in the Tegra 3 is not the most powerful so the fact that the GPU in RK3066 surpasses it isn't really that shocking. Depending on the type of load, the GPU in AML8726-MX can perform similar to the Tegra 3 or at worst it can perform at ~68% of the Tegra 3. Considering that I bought the Ramos W17Pro at USD140, I really have no complain.

I am considering removing Basemark results in future reviews as it have a tendency to favour QualComm GPUs as well as being dependent on the device's native resolution. Just for fun, lets compare RK3066 with iPhone 4S and Galaxy S3 in GLBenchmark!

In Egypt, RK3066 is 1.4x faster than iPhone 4S while in Pro, it performs similarly to the iPhone 4S. Nothing else to say here other than well done to the Rockchip engineers!

Form Factor

Once you have decided on which SOC to go with for your next tablet, the task becomes easier as you have now narrowed down the choices. All you need to do now is decide which size is suitable for you and which brand has the most support by the community (i.e. tabletrepublic.com and slatedroid.com). Whereas the performance of the tablets are objective as in we can objectively measure their performance using third party applications, we cannot objectively 'measure' which form factor is better than the other.

The usage patterns of different customers will be different hence it is not possible to give a general advice on this matter. What matters is what YOU think of the size and whether you can live with it or not. For me personally, I have tested the 7inch, 9.7inch as well as the 10.1inch tablets and I can say for ME, I prefer the 7inch form factor as it is bigger than a smartphone while weighing almost the same. The screen size is big enough for me to surf on and does not limit my usage. I also noticed that the bigger form factors tires me after prolonged usage mostly because of their weight and is not suitable for one hand operation.

Therefore, it is important that you try these different form factors on your own and see which one you like the most. Reading other peoples' thoughts on this matter is useless as you will be the one using it in the end. If you don't like it then do not buy it regardless of whatever people think of it.

Conclusion

In the end, after all these benchmarks, the decision is still yours to make. If I can offer you any advice, try to not spend more than USD150 on any Chinese tablet as there are plenty of choices which cost less than that. If you decided to spend more than that, make sure the tablet have IPS screen, at least 1GB of RAM and of course a dual core SOC. Check the forums AND youtube for reviews on the tablet as well as any problems reported by early users. If more than one user is reporting a fault, this most likely means that it is a widespread issue and it is best for you to stay away from the tablet however tempting the specifications are. It is ultimately up to you to decide just how much is brand name, reliability and mainstream support worth. After all, peace of mind goes a long way.

References
On T30L, Samsung S3 and iPhone results you can go to Anandtech and search for scores there.
http://results.rightware.com/devices/535
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAdC5HAyV7A

For the RK3066 results:
http://tabletrepublic.com/forum/cortex-a9-rockchip-3066/window-n90-dual-core-benchmark-results-2053.html
http://bbs.imp3.net/thread-10712275-1-1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGf6f97gzwE&feature=related
http://www.glbenchmark.com/phonedetails.jsp?benchmark=glpro21&D=Yuandao+N90+DUAL+CORE2&testgroup=overall

Improving League of Legends (US) Latency using 3rd Party Router Firmwares

2012-07-30T16:01:00.001-07:00

Introduction

Ideally, online gamers should have unlimited bandwidth. Or at least 10Mbps and 1Mbps downstream and upstream bandwidth respectively. Unfortunately, reality is harsh and lots of these gamers often have to endure playing using restricted bandwidth. Even worse, we have to share these precious resources with other people whom we often have no control over. In order to reach a compromise (fairness) to allow us to game comfortably and others to use the internet as they wish, Quality of Service (or simply QoS) is an essential, if not a must, for us gamers.

Let me start by explaining my current situation. Having studied in the UK, having plenty of bandwidth (30Mbps down, 3Mbps up) have definitely spoiled me and having had to return to my home country (Brunei) where the service we subscribed to only offered 1Mbps down and 0.3Mbps up definitely makes me miss UK a little bit. I don’t generally care about throughput, I rarely stream and download big files and when I do, I have no problem waiting for days. It is the responsiveness that I crave.

Now the problem; I share this connection with 10 other people in the house. Yes, that’s 10. About 9KBps per person if everyone is using the network fairly. Laughable, I know. But I can live with that as long as I can surf websites without timeouts and as long as I can play League of Legends comfortably. The thing is most of the times, my sisters and brothers left their uTorrent clients running on their computers while they work and as we all know just one of these is enough to stress a typical consumer router. Imagine 3 of them running concurrently; no wonder they always had to restart the router every day in my absence. Mind you, this only started when I started doing my degree so I was not there when this started.

Now that I am home, I can finally experience just how frustrating it is to use the internet. Google searches most of the time takes >10s where it should be <1s. Forget streaming Youtube, the buffering seems to take forever and that is if the router does not restart. League of Legends you say? LOL. Don’t even bother unless you can play under ~3000-5000ms latency. (I thought the maximum LoL client can display is 999ms but if you press ctrl+f in-game you can see way more than this. Wayyyyy more J )

3^rd Party Firmware

Studying computer science myself, I looked into why the router restarts itself so frequently. Few minutes of googling suggests that the router is running out of the available memory and/or that it has reached/exceeded the connections limit. At this stage, I was clueless about router but I do routinely checks the administration page of the router and never have I seen any setting to adjust the connection limits. Frustrating.

DD-WRT

More googling and then I found my first third party firmware, DD-WRT. I read lots of the reviews on the net about it and most people seems to be content with DD-WRT. General sentiment is that it is bloated but stable and support lots of different hardware configurations. I bought a new router (Asus RT-N10Plus) making sure that it is compatible with DD-WRT.

Connections Limit

Installing it was a breeze, it was just a matter of googling and following the instructions. Once loaded, I increased the connections limit to 8192 up from the default 4096. Under the administration page, we can also see just how many connections currently connected hosts are making/using. To my surprise, my brother’s PC spawned ~4000 UDP connections just after the router successfully booted up. P2P at its best.

So, by now we no longer have a router that randomly reboots but the surfing experience is still dreadful although it was a tiny bit more bearable. Websites still takes too long to load but they do finish loading all elements. Exploring the administration site introduced me to QoS.

QoS

Put simply, QoS is a way of prioritizing packets. Different firmware handles this differently so be sure to read into their documentation. With DD-WRT you can assign packets to these classes; Exempt, Premium, Express, Standard and Bulk. These packets can be classified using several ways for example by using the ports or the source or destination IPs.

So, I turned the QoS on and carefully adjusted the settings. DNS and packets of less than <1MB is classified as Premium, >1MB is Standard, LoL packets as Express and bitTorrent as Bulk. This MASSIVELY improved surfing experience but it does not really help LoL experience. Somehow, when the link is saturated the router simply started dropping packets regardless of which class it belongs to. Having huge packet loss in LoL is VERY unacceptable. Ping is lowered down to 500ms, improved but still terrible.

Unfortunately, heavy load (3 torrentors/tormentors?) still makes the router crawl. It takes a long time to access the administration page and upon checking the stats it seems that it is running out of memory (this particular router have 32MB of RAM) and the CPU usage is pretty high.

OpenWRT

After a few day of tinkering DD-WRT, it is clear that I cannot improve the gaming experience any further . I then turned to OpenWRT which is an open-source and minimal firmware alternative to DD-WRT. Under it, you can choose what you want to install and this way you can minimize any unnecessary use of the precious router’s RAM and ROM. I then installed QOS-scripts and proceeded to set up the QoS as before.

I found out that, and this may be due to my settings or my hardware or the combination of them both, the QoS under OpenWRT is much more responsive than DD-WRT. LoL experience improved further but still it was dropping packets although the latency is now down to ~400ms. Still unplayable although the router stays responsive under heavy load. Fortunately, further googling introduced me to my favourite firmware; Gargoyle!

Gargoyle

Gargoyle allows home users to play around with features usually only available on uber expensive enterprise routers; quota management. With this feature, you can decide just how much data can one client use and then either to stop their access to the internet or just throttle their bandwidth. And from experience I can tell you that it works!

With gargoyle, I can set limits to just how much bandwidth can a class in the QoS classification use. The QoS feature in Gargoyle is rather very exhaustive and I do not think I would do it any justice trying to explain it in this post. Head over to http://www.gargoyle-router.com to learn more. This is my current QoS implementation in Gargoyle:

Upload

Download

With these settings, I managed to get 210ms latency in LoL! A massive improvement indeed. Other users also gave positive responses as they noted that the router no longer restarts itself and that even while torrenting, browsing experience is generally still smooth.

However, that is not the end of my story. While Gargoyle can limit how much bandwidth a user can use, it does not allow us to limit the number of connections a client can make hence even one heavy bitTorrent user can flood the router making it unavailable for few seconds till it stabilize again. To Google we search again. BTW, as the old ASUS router is not supported by Gargoyle I had to purchase a new router Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH which is supported by Gargoyle.

Tomato

After lots of googling, I found another 3^rd Party firmware; Tomato. However, I did not use the default distribution and settled on one of the available mods called TomatoRAF. At this point, I decided that I need BOTH the bandwidth management and connection limit features so I will need both Gargoyle and TomatoRAf. So, I bought another router to run Gargoyle with plenty of RAM to handle the traffic shaping. In the end, I settled on Buffalo wzr-hp-g300nh to run Gargoyle and my old router Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 to run TomatoRAF and act as the wireless access point.

Under TomatoRAF, there is an option called IP/MAC BW Limiter where you can limit the bandwidth as well as the number of connections each user can make at any given time. With this set, the flooding problem is solved and as an added plus, the Tomato kernel is very stable requiring very few reboots.

Limiting TCP connections per user.

Limiting UDP connections per user.

Conclusion

That is the end of LoL dilemma and what an interesting journey it was. I hope that helps somebody in their search to better online gaming experience. Although I have to buy two routers due to my rather complicated problem, many of you out there most probably only need one to satisfy your needs. The first step I recommend you guys to do is buy a router that is known to be supported by Gargoyle AND check the forum if there is any reported issues with the router under Gargoyle. Any issues like wireless dropping and random wireless disconnections, it is in your best interest to find other compatible router. With all that said, the choice is for you to make and if you decide to risk it, go with it and experiment with your setup. In my opinion, that is half of the fun with all these firmware anyway.

And just to end this post, here is my happy ending.

Ramos W17 Pro and AML8726-MX review

2012-07-23T14:33:00.002-07:00

Ramos W17 Pro

Why
I wanted to know if relatively unknown manufacturers like AMLogic can stand a chance against dual core chips I have tested before (TI OMAP 4430, APQ8860 and Tegra 2). I got this from a seller on Aliexpress.com for about GBP90 with UPS shipping.

Store:Shenzhen Eternal Technology Co., Ltd.

Supplier: Sles-May ET

Took a day for them to ship it and 3 working days to reach me.

Specifications
CPU: AMLogic ML8726-MX, dual-core Cortex A9 at up to 1.5Ghz.
GPU: Mali400MP2
RAM: 1GB
OS: Android 4.0.3
Firmware: 0517
Internal Memory: 816
Screen Size: 7"
Screen Resolution: 1024x768
Webcam: 1.3MP (front only)
Battery: 3200mAH Li-Ion.

Build Quality

When I first lifted the tablet, I cannot get over just how light it is. It is advertised as weighing only 304g and I have no trouble believing that. It is so damn light! Fortunately, it also does not feel cheap. I think this is mostly because of the textured back.

The front is like any other buttonless tablet. Nothing special here. There is a little bleeding of light from one side of the screen of my unit but I can live with this very minor issue. It won't be visible unless you look for it.and I can't even take a picture to show it. Maybe it is time for me to invest in a proper camera :) Ignore the background. Please.

The usual ports such as MiniUSB, 3.5mm headphone jack, rest button, volume buttons as well as TF card slot are available. Notice the lack of any HDMI ports.

Screen
Before I get on with the screen, let me just show you the packaging.

In case you didn't catch that, here's a closer look at the important bit.

Yeah, the screen is not IPS. BUT do not let that deter you from reading any further as the screen performed admirably... for a non IPS panel that is. Here is how the screen looks at its lowest brightness. Its visible head on but not so much on any other sides. Use this if you are using it in your bedroom without any other competing light sources switched on.

And here is the screen at 50% brightness. This is my usual setting and is the one I recommend using. The sacrifice on battery life is worth it. It is visible on most angles except if you are viewing it perpendicularly. Since its an 7" tablet, I doubt you would need/want to do it anyway so its really almost a non-issue.

Finally, at its full glory. Clearly whatever anti-glare coating/technology Ramos is using here is working. Good job on improving the viewing angle as well as maintaining the low price!

Camera
Nothing special. It works well without stutters and works with Skype. Low quality camera but I rarely use it anyway. Image quality is sharp when there is enough light. It does not handle low light conditions well so make sure to use it in a well lit room.

Speakers and Headphone jack
To be honest, I was prepared to be disappointed with the Ramos' speaker (its only a mono speaker). BUT somehow Ramos continues to impress here! I mean of course, the quality is far and way below those of the Touchpad's but it is WAY better than the ones in SmartQ Ten3 T15 I reviewed earlier.

Obviously, there is no bass and just a hint of mids but the vocals are clear and crisp. The treble are not harsh and more importantly it does not distorts under any volume setting. That is really an accomplishment for a chinese tablet manufacturer!

Playing back music using headphones is easy due to the standard 3.5mm jack. Audio output is clean with no obvious noise at any volume. Dynamic range is good. Volume is plenty so it should not have any problem powering most consumer headphones.

Battery Life
I no longer uses the tablet as I gave it to my niece for her birthday (and hence the background and the bed sheet) so this part is purely based on my 2 weeks experience of using the tablet. First off, if you used it fully with wifi turned on, screen at 50% and running 3D games it would last at most 4 hours. If you are a light user e.g. you surf periodically and let the tablet sleep every now and then expect to see about 8hrs or so of usage. And if you are like my niece, who happened to be a very light surfer hence wifi almost always turned off, brightness turned all the way down and use it mainly for gaming then according to her (but remember, she is 8 but with an amazingly well developed systems of thought I must say) you will need to charge it after 12 hours of usage. That really is the upper limit of what you can expect and I do not remember ever getting that much out of the battery.

ML8725-MX
Finally! The main reason why I bought the tablet in the first place. The SOC! For this unit, I decided to benchmark under the different CPU governing modes i.e. Power Saving, Normal and Performance. Power saving will cap your CPU clock to 1GHz while Normal sets it to 1.2GHz and Performance to its full 1.5GHz speed.

The main reason is that different people have different needs and expectations from the tablet. What is deemed acceptable by one person might not be enough for another. And also, it seems like there are complaints about the Ramos being too hot while in operation. Based on my experience, the Performance mode does certainly heats up the back side of the tablet but it is still within the acceptable side for me. Using it under Normal mode will heat it up a little bit but is comparable to the heat produced when you use any modern smartphones to surf on a 3G connection. You can feel it but it really is nothing major. And finally under the Power Saving mode the tablet will turn at most lukewarm under any load. This is what my niece is using all the time and the performance is apparently enough for her needs.

General Performance
Under all the three CPU governing modes, the tablet still operates smoothly. These are occasional brief stutters in the Power Saving mode but does not really affect the user experience. Browsing is smooth using the stock browser even with the pre-installed flash player enabled but obviously the Chrome browser is way smoother.

Performance

Sunspider 0.9.1

Rightware Browsermark

GLBenchmark 2.1.4

Basemark Taiji

Linpack

Antutu

Overall
Just to put things into perspective, here is a table showing the different performance of the SOC under all the modes. Performance under Performance mode is considered as 100%.

So, on average you get 70% of the maximum performance on Power Saving mode and 88% on Normal mode. You will have to decide on your own which mode to use based on your usage. From these limited data, it suggested that 3D performance is not really affected by the modes but otherwise the performance difference are pretty striking between Power Saving and Performance mode.

Comparison with other SOCs
Please note that I do not have any data for AnTuTu under Tegra 2 hence the 0 score.

Simply put, the SOC with the fastest CPU is still clearly the TI OMAP 4430 with the AML8726-MX coming in second. However, put the GPU into account then without any doubts the AML8726-MX clearly dominates the benchmarks thanks to the dual Mali400 cores. If you plan on gaming on a cheap tablet, among these 4 choices the obvious winner is AML8726-MX. Of course, provided that the design allows it to properly dissipate heat.

Wireless Performance
The wireless performs okay when you are close to the router but sucks otherwise. My router is a pretty good performer (WHR-HP-G54) with a built-in amplifier and Tomato firmware installed so this should be more than enough. For whatever reasons, the wireless just will not work on areas where the signal is worse than -65dB. Good thing I have mini routers lying around so turned one of them into a repeater and all is well.

Conclusion
I love this tablet! The best chinese tablet I have reviewed so far. If somehow they can improve future revisions to fix the wireless reception as well as perhaps adding some cheap heatsink to help with the heat issue, I would easily recommend this to anybody looking for a cheap tablet but as it is, the Ramos W17 Pro is an excellent performer.

Philips CitiScape Uptown Review

2012-07-22T02:14:00.000-07:00

Philips CitiScape Uptown Review

Initial Impression

Straight out of the box, I was really disappointed with the sound. It was too thin with lots of emphasize on the treble. The bass somehow sounds separated from the rest of the spectrum. However, the cushion really won me over. Did some research online and found out that this particular headphone greatly benefit from burn in. So the following review is on a unit that has been used for >200 hours.

Comfort

VERY comfortable. The set itself is light that you won't feel burdened by its weight but at same time enough to remind you that you are wearing it. The cushion is where it excels. It pads over you whole ears and is oh so soft. It is also breathable so your ears won't get sweaty after extended hours of usage. Full marks here.

Build Quality

Very well built. Initially, I wasn't so sure because the metal parts connecting the cups to the rest of the headphones does look fragile but I have been traveling with it a lot and its still intact so I guess my fears are unfounded. This says a lot as I don't particularly pay any attention when packing, I usually just cramp all my stuff into my small backpack and then run to the train station. It survived many of such occasions so I am pretty confident that it will survive moderate abuses.

Sound Quality
Bass

I found the bass to be accurate and tight. It is not overpowering the other spectrum but is certainly there. With this headphone, I think the bass is more like for you to hear rather than feel. You won't feel the rumble but you can definitely hear it. You get me? :) This is really the only thing I don't like about this unit but this is of course a matter of personal preference. This unit also reproduces the lower frequency bass excellently (good bass extension). My perfect unit would be an Uptown with more (lots and lots more) bass impact.

Mids

The mids are warm but ever-so-slightly recessed. Vocals are clear but not forward or recessed. The mids float on the middle I guess. That is how it sounds to me anyway and to be honest it is quite confusing to explain it in words.

Treble

The Uptown does have some emphasize on the treble but not overly so that its fatiguing. It is bright, infact a little too bright for my taste but is still in the tolerable region. Cymbals particularly sound too metallic but really that is just me being picky. Most of the time I do use the equalizer to tone down these frequencies.

Soundstage

Excellent. Really, so much so that I don't think I can differentiate between an open air design sets to this based on its soundstage. It is expansive but not overly so that it sounds artificial. One thing I noticed is that this vary greatly on the quality of the files you are playing. Listening to my old (low bitrate) collections sounds somehow compressed with limited soundstage. This particular unit does need high bitrate sources to excel and for this reason alone I deem it not suitable for the general public :)

Separation

Very good indeed. The sounds are well separated but at the same time does not sound out of place. Everything have its place without bleeding into each others' region.

Isolation/Sound Leaks

Philips called it MusicSeal, whatever it is, it sure does work. Once you start listening to your music you can barely hear any other outside noises. I used this set when I was on my flight home (a 15-hours journey) and there was this baby constantly crying. Once I put this on, I can barely hear the cries although once the music stopped you can definitely still hear some outside noise. This, plus its comfort makes it an almost perfect companion for traveling.

And it isolates your music from the others as well as it isolates you from the outside noise. Unless someone is sitting uncomfortably close to you, he/she will not be able to hear what you are listening to. Another plus for travelers.

Overall

To put everything into a sentence, the Philips Uptown is really the jack of all trade, master of none. Its characteristics does not favor any genre specifically nor does it negatively affect the listening experience to any of them. If there is just somehow more bass impact, I would have stopped my search for my 'Ideal' headphone. With that said, this would suffice for now. The Philips Uptown is a very capable headphone but bassheads will most definitely call them boring.

If you want to buy one of these, consider buying from Amazon.co.uk for about £70 that is unless you can find it cheaper elsewhere.

Overdue Touchpad WebOS review

2012-07-21T11:47:00.002-07:00

Typed this a long time ago and I actually forgot that I have a blog :). Without further ado..

HP Touchpad

Build Quality
The Touchpad is well built. The back is made of plastics but does not feel that cheap. One thing I did not notice at first was the weight. Whenever I buy tablets, my housemates usually try them out and give their opinions. When one of my female housemates first picked up the Touchpad, her first comment was that it is much heavier than my previous tablets. To be honest, I still could not feel the difference but if you are a female you might need to take this into consideration :)

WebOS Performance
This was my first encounter with WebOS and having read Anand's (of Anandtech) thoughts on it I could not help but be excited. On some fronts, I can see why people prefers WebOS to the other OSes but on many others it falls short. OK, to start things lets talk about browsing experience.

Browsing
Lets set things straight, the WebOS browser is a very capable browser. It actually feels like a full fledged PC browser. The functionalitis (Java, JS, Flash and etc.) are baked in out of the box. The flash capability is among the best differentiating factor from the Android and Safari browsers in my opinion; it is a complete flash experience! You can even stream TV channels live.

Where it falter is performance and performance is really the Achilles' heel for WebOS in general. Browsing on the Touchpad is a complete (PC-like) experience but it is like browsing on a netbook. If you try to multitask while watching flash videos you will get stutters. Heck, even if you play songs using the default music player and surf simultaneously you will get stutters.

Productivity
As I bought the HP touchpad during my exam's season, I get to try the Adobe PDF reader and QuickOffice app provided by default in the Touchpad. They have no problems opening files (pdf, doc, xls and etc, not sure about Office 2007 file formats like docx though) but rendering the files take some time. When you first open up a file, you will see a blurred up image of the file and it usually take a few minutes to render properly. It is a little frustrating considering the instantaneous experience in Android.

Multitasking
If there is any aspects of the WebOS which I absolutely love, its the multitasking ability. Somehow, the card system feels right for tablets. You simple swipe from the bottom of the screen to the middle to minimize apps and switch between apps. To close them, just swipe them to the top. It is simple, effective and may I say, elegent. Whenever I am using Android, I frequently find myself doing this only to realize I am not using WebOS. Hopefully Google will try to emulate this aspect, it really is that good!

Audio Quality
EXCELLENT. The best I have heard from tablets so far. It is not particularly powerful but the quality is really good! The speakers never get distorted even at full volume. Highs are slightly recessed but still okay. The mids, oh the mids! The lower range is where this thing shine. I was skepticle when I first see the Beats logo as Beats tend to exagurate the bass but here they have done a good job. Online sources say that the DSP HP uses in Touchpad improves the sound quality by increasing the dynamic range of the sound. Purists might not like this but personally I have no complain :)

Camera Quality
Image quality is quite good. It performs almost as good as my notebook's internal camera and that is not really a compliment.

Apps
As WebOS will be Open-Sourced soon, this might or might not change but as it is there are very few games and apps available for the Touchpad under webOS. if you want, you can install PreWare and install community developed apps and games. I tried a few of them and found that most of the were intended for phones so you get this small phone screen on your Touchpad and there is no way to scale them up fullscreen. Not fun.

Overall
WebOS is a unique experience but after using it, I no longer wonder why it is dead. The performance is very far behind the other major OSes and this shows when Android fliessss on the exact same hardware. Get Touchpad if you like tinkering with it to get Android and you like showing off its speakers but otherwise, just get some other tablets with Android 'natively' installed.

SteelSeries Siberia V2 review

2012-05-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

About the Author
Why
My brother told me to buy it for him, apparently there was this one time fire sale on SteelSeries's website. Bought it around 4 months ago and it has been gathering dust ever since. So decided that I might as well test and review it :) If I like it, I might even get one for myself.

Background
I have not owned that many headphones. Before heading to the UK (where the walls are EXTREMELY thin), I did not really see much use of headphones as I prefer to use my speakers (tried many many speakers) to listen to anything. Anyway, some of my past headphones are the Bose QuietComfort 3 (did NOT buy it myself, my sister bought it and just gave it to me for some reasons which I cannot recall), Sennheiser HD201 (bought it when I first came to UK, it was cheap) and currently using Sennheiser HD219. Did not really like any of them to be honest. It seems like there was always something missing. And finally, if it is not obvious already, I am NOT an audiophile.

Music
I listen to different types of musics, mostly whatever is on the radio (mainstream) and some opera but definitely none of the K-Pop or J-Pop or whatever-Pop it is.

SteelSeries Siberia V2

Warning: This is based on a straight out-of-the-box experience with the set. There is no burn-in time and this may/may not change the sound quality of the headphones however rarely does such headphones in this price range needs a burn-in period. With that said, I have limited experience hence take this review as it is :).

Comfort
As of this writing, I have been wearing the headphones for about three hours and I have not experienced any discomfort. The paddings are quite comfortable and it is also light that you tend to forget you are wearing it if you are not playing anything through it.

Build Quality
It is acceptable, I guess. However, since this is not mine, I would not really use it till I sleep like I did with all my previous headphones. I broke both the Bose and the HD201 this way :) The HD219 is surprisingly still intact. If I were to guess, the Siberia V2 is not really a heavy duty headphones. There is something about it that does not exudes sturdiness and it is most obvious on the upper parts.

Sound Quality
Bass
Oh the bass... Sooo smooth. If there's anything that will remind you that this is a gaming headphones, its the bass. The bass is accurate and is not overbearing. However, I would have thought that gamers would like exaggerated bass. The bass on this headphone, while good, is not particularly powerful and not punchy either like most gaming headphones I have tested. It is there when its supposed to be there but its not the kind that will rattle your head. Many gamers I know of ( limited sample of people :) ) prefer deeper and more dominant bass so I would guess that this would disappoint many but it actually suits my taste :).

Mids
The mids are warm but recessed. This is, of course, a matter of preference but I like the vocals to be forward and direct. While the mids are clear, it is not as dominant compared the bass or the treble. Maybe its just the type of musics that I listened to but this really is apparent to my ears.

Treble
SIBILANT! Google that. And not in the good way. Nothing an equalizer can't fix but disappointing nonetheless.

Soundstage
Excellent. Well this is an open-air design afterall. There is none of that closed-bottled feeling here. Aside from the bass, this is also clearly one of the qualities that will remind you that this is first and foremost a gaming gear. I guess this will add the realism in games? I am not really a gamer and only play RTS so I cannot say. Seriously, the soundstage is noticeably good and it is one of the things that I miss when I switched to other headphones.

Separation
Excellent as well! You can clearly hear all the distinct instruments being played. Listening to Gotye's Somebody I Used To Know is a totally new experience. The dominant bass never really bleeds into other ranges and this is excellent.

Isolation/Sound Leaks
Since this is an open-air headphones, there is basically no isolation from the outside world/noise. In fact, while writing this I am listening to an opera performance with my table fan turned on (its summer) and I can still make out the noise of the fan during the quiet parts of the aria.

It also leaks sound just as bad. But really, this is an open-air design and it performs as such. Please do not use this while commuting, unless you want to annoy yourself with the noises as well as others with your music.

Overall
Based on my limited testing time, unfortunately it is clear that this headphone is not for me. I find its sound signature to be too fatiguing. The treble is really its weakest point. And the recessed mids doesn't really help either.

However, since this is geared mostly to gamers, I do not think that they will be picky about all these issues. The main thing they care about is bass (again, just a personal assumption :p) and on that front I think it performs fine with good soundstage as an added bonus. Even then, I think some will be disappointed as bass is not that powerful. With all that said, I would rate it 3/5 for the comfort, bass and great soundstage.

Life

2012-04-28T20:09:00.003-07:00

Busy busy busy with uni life nowadays. Will only have time to properly write reviews after the 12th. I am currently working on three important courseworks:

1) Android group project; an app where you can track your friends (after they approved you of course), chat, share points of interests, keep your timetable and the locations of your classes(you have to manually set this) and also view others' timetables. Ambitious project, but so far I am enjoying it. For the server part, we used JSONEngine deployed on Google App Engine so that we do not have to code any servlet ourselves :) Worth 100% of the module.

2) Writing a 'simple' compiler using ANTLR. At first I was struggling to see how to do it but fortunately as I work more on it, things started becoming clearer. TBH, I find it quite fun :) Worth 60% of the module.

3) Designing and implementing a database system (using ORACLE) for a hypothetical any hobby related forum. Reading the requirements makes it looked like its a lot of work. After spending a day on designing it, and of course learning how to use triggers and sequences, it looks very doable. Haven't actually started making queries on it though, hopefully I will finish the compiler first and then I'll work on this.

I know readers wont be interested on reading this, I am just posting this for myself :) I tend to forget things very easily so if next year I have to juggle doing multiple coursework at the same time, I can read this again and at least remember that I have been through this before :)

Anyway, as I need to use Android 2.3.3 on my Touchpad for the Android project, I cannot fully review the HP Touchpad under 4.0.3 and compare the SOC (Qualcomm APQ8660) to the other two I have used before. However, once all the datelines are done, I plan to do the following reviews:

Since I have to revert to older versions of Android on the Touchpad, I was thinking of comparing the performances of all the different Android versions available on the Touchpad so I can compare the performances between Gingerbread, HoneyComb and ICS. This should be fun.
Once thats done, I would like to post the long-due HP Touchpad review :)
Review webOS on TouchPad.
Review (and buy) Blackberry Playbook. Why? Because I heard the speakers are awesome :D
Review (and buy) Ainol Aurora 2 tablet. It uses AmLogic AML8726-MX. I am really curious about the SoC's performance and searching online doesn't help. There is no (none that I can find anyway) proper reliable review on it. It would be nice to compare budget dual-core SoCs from China to other mainstream SoCs.
Review (and buy) Brainwavs HM5 headphone.I love good quality headphones! I used to be a bass-junkie. My first speaker was the Altec Lasing VS2521. God, I used to love that speaker! The bass is good (considering the small subwoofer size) and the mid range is warm and rich. Over time, I wanted to hear more details. As the VS2521 have no dedicated tweeters for producing higher frequencies, there is a certain loss of realism when watching movies and listening to classical musics. Sopranos sound unusually warm so over time I started buying other speakers and testing them. After getting bored with trying out speakers, I settled on Harman Kardon Soundsticks speakers and then my obsession with headphones started. Didn't get to try many though as I was about to start my first year back then. Now and then when I am bored, I usually go to electronic stores trying out headphones. Right now my preferred brand is Sennheiser as they tend to sound neutral and balanced (moved on from that bass-is-everything stage). Read reviews of the Brainwavz online and it sounds like a headphone that I would like.

Done.

CM9 on TouchPad and APQ8660 review

2012-04-23T19:29:00.002-07:00

This is NOT a review of the latest CM9 nightly build. This one was released on 4/04/12 and was not updated to the latest because I simply do not have the time right now.

And also, this will not be a full review of HP Touchpad as I intend to do that on Android 4.0.3 so that the data (of Tegra2 and TI OMAP 4430) I have are comparable. For these reasons, there will be no comparisons made in this post(to the mentioned SOC).

HP Touchpad Specs
CPU: Qualcomm APQ8660, Dual Scorpion cores at 1.2GHz.
GPU: Adreno 220.
RAM: 1GB.
Display: 9.7" 1024x768 IPS.

General Performance
In day-to-day tasks, it is smooth enough although there seems to be a little lag in the menu/launcher every time it is launched. Not terrible but the brief slowdowns are noticeable. Browsing experience is excellent, pinch-to-zoom gesture worked nicely although again, you will experience some hiccups/lag on sites with flash ads. I have to say this though, although the experience itself is smooth, it is noticeably slower than on Advent Vega and Ten3 T15.

Sunspider 0.9.1

Rightware Benchmark

GLBenchmark 2.1.4

Basemark Taiji

Linpack Mutli-Thread

Linpack Single-Thread

Quadrant

Antutu

Issues
As with all builds of Android on TouchPad, the camera and internal mic are not accessible. I also experienced the 'battery drain' syndrome described by many others but its not that severe in my opinion. Although the GPU in the Touchpad is quite powerful(quite possibly the most powerful among the three), the CPU side is not as powerful and this shows while playing many games (stuttering in ShadowGun opening and stutters while in-game playing Ninja Chicken for example.)

To be honest, the only device which never had any slowdown playing these games in my experience is the Ten3 T15. My educated guess would be these games are more CPU-bound than GPU bound at these times. This could also be due to the Scorpion CPU cores being in-order rather than being out-of-order like the other 2 competitors hence the lower performance.

The sound quality coming from the internal speakers(which is the best I have heard so far) under the webOS is also significantly better than under any Android ROMs I have tested. There will be a video on this in a later post.

Other than that, I can honestly say that I enjoyed using this ROM on my Touchpad. Big thanks to the people at the CyanogenMod and all the other developers who worked hard at making this happen! Thank you for supporting a 'dead' product :)

Touchpad

2012-04-19T14:34:00.002-07:00

My Touchpad has arrived! And can I just say this, I freaking love webOS! :)
Anyway, loaded CM9 nightly build (ICS 4.0.4) and it looks good. I was thinking of whether to review it under 4.0.4 or 4.0.3 and then decided to do both :) So especially for Touchpad, I'll be reviewing it under webOS, Android 4.0.3 and Android 4.0.4. Do note that the camera and microphone does not work under Android.
Too busy with courseworks right now so can't really review this baby properly. Will be done by the end of this week, hopefully.

Till then,
YS.