13 responses to “EEVblog #295 – $30 eBook Reader Teardown”

• Goophy69 June 20th, 2012 at 15:05

  Very nice price indeed, a little interedted in buying one for just reading txt on the go. XDX

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• Guille June 21st, 2012 at 02:08

  At 16:10 there’s some solder bridging between two pins of the main device!!!

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• Guille June 21st, 2012 at 02:17

  And at 18:07 you can see a solder ball from manufacturing. They seem to have some trouble with the solder paste.

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• Worf June 21st, 2012 at 03:41

  I think the “PU” in the case actually means polyurethane?

  No big surprise really – I wonder what surplus LCDs they found for it – probably from portable DVD players (which use 800×480 LCDs and manufactured in huge quantities).

  And once again, what separates the crap from the Kindle boils all down to the software. China’s just not there yet with firmware development…

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• Rafael June 21st, 2012 at 05:32

  Interesting teardown…
  To me the assembly and accessory bundle was very impressive for the price. A 600MHz ARM9+DSP with an 800×400 display that can also play videos? It is really a bargain.
  Two issues I imagine come to play: battery life and the strangeness of the Operating System… Wikipedia in Spanish says it sports a Rockchip OS!

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• Ice Skate June 22nd, 2012 at 01:28

  Hi Dave,

  Thanks for this interesting tear down, very instructive, and I hope in the future you will review one of this best success of Chinese’s Android Tablet too! Multi-Tumbs up! ;-b

  In the hope to read some hacks to improve capabilties of this type of toy (soldering hack session?)…

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• GregoryW June 22nd, 2012 at 05:33

  Missing parts at 17:39 are probably for mentioned FM Radio. Big footprint seems to match AR1010 FM Receiver Module in I2C configuration.

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• Richard June 22nd, 2012 at 10:47

  Why is it that every time you see a crystal you immediately check if they are fixed in place ? Clearly there’s some reason for having them fixed in place but… why ?.

  I’m sorry if this is a stupid question but hey… We are all here to teach each other a bit. right?

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  • McPete June 22nd, 2012 at 15:57

    Richard:
    Being a largish, fairly heavy device, with long leads, dropping a device with an unrestrained crystal can move the crystal, short the leads/something else nearby.

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• dendad June 23rd, 2012 at 08:04

  Hi.
  It would have been of interest to lift the PCB and look at the LCD to find a type number as it may tell us if it is useable in another project. If so, that is a cheap source of reasonable size LCDs. As it is, it is not a real bad device considering the price.

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• D. Garlans June 24th, 2012 at 20:07

  It’s always disappointing to me to see a device like this which has (relatively) decent hardware, but it’s let down bigtime by software.

  Makes you wonder what a dedicated development team with a bit more time and money could do with that same hardware.

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• Nick June 25th, 2012 at 06:02

  Heh, I just saw this video and spotted it in a shop near me. The price was 500 DKK = 84 AUD!

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• Nick June 25th, 2012 at 06:03

  But it was in black rather than purple.

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