Creative Chinese Tablet Specs - A Warning

[amspire]

I recently wanted a tablet. The only thing it had to be able to do was showing pictures and videos  and so I thought I would have a go at buying a cheap Chinese tablet from Aliexpress. Didn't like any of the cheap local tablets.

After many minutes of research, I went for the great world famous Dongpad T900.



For $A123 delivered (by DHL mail), I got myself a 10" 1920x1200 IPS screen, 4G RAM, 64G ROM, 8 core 2GHz tablet with 3G and 4G  dual SIM phone. 12G camera. 5000 mAh battery. Not a bad! The phone did all the Australian 3G bands and a few of the Australian 4G bands.

It arrived in 11 days complete with screen protector, Australian power pack, earphones and microUSB to female USB adapter so you could plug USB memory into the tablet. Packing was superb. Impressive! It is not  a bad tablet to use - screen seems good, the applications I needed all work, GPS worked well. Ran Netflix pretty well.

The thing I hadn't realised was the creative magic of the Chinese manufacturer - it went far beyond anything I was expecting.

First noticed something funny about the ROM - when I stored 1G, the free memory went down by 4G. Yes, they hacked the Android OS to multiply ROM space by 4! It really had 16G of ROM.

With the 4G RAM, only 2G was useable. The other 2G of RAM is reported to be there but nothing can use it. Hmmm.

Next the screen. Android reports it as 1920x1200 just as advertised. I did some testing though and it is really 1280x737 pixels - again half the specified space.

Now I guess if you are on a roll, why stop?

The specified OS was 7.0 but the API level is 22 - that is Android 5. Checked for Android 7 features - No, they did't work! Android 6 features? No, definitely not! They have faked the Android version!

Then I tested the back camera (which I don't need). It claims 12 MPixels but it is worse then a 640x480 pixels camera. In fact video mode produces a way better picture then the still camera mode. Looks like the software they added to make their low res camera appear to be 12MPixels destroyed the functionality of the camera.

May as well test the front camera - it is also pretty bad and very narrow angle, so I got a great video capture of my nose.

So on to the processor - specified as the Mediatek MT 8752 8 core 2GHz ARMv8 processor. A really good CPU. The Android OS confirms this, but also confirms it as a ARMv7 CPU!.  The benchmarks were well under half the expected speeds, and the GPU was a Mali-400MP. Funny as the MT8752 has a Mali-T760 GPU. Yes, they hacked the Android not only to fake the CPU model, but it seems they also fake the number of cores and they probably double the reported CPU core speeds. It appears to be a 2012/2013 era ARMv7 4 core CPU probably running about 1GHz. It is not the fastest tablet, but it is usable.

Just finished testing the specified 5000mAh battery. I took it down to under 1% and recharged with the tablet off. 3800mAh to fully recharge. I hadn't expected it to be that good after all the previous results.

How about phone. Amazing! It works. However, the inbuilt antenna is really bad and when connected, the phone signal icon shows 4G next to it even when connected to 3G. The hackers couldn't help themselves.  As long as the signal is not weak, it really does work.

I was just amazed at how it wasn't one or two things faked - it was absolutely anything they could fake. I probably still have more treasures to discover. The reason for posting this is just to let people know how fake the cheap tablets can be. There will be many buyer who never realise the tablet is fake since all the faked specs are confirmed by the Andoid OS and by the CPU-z app they preinstall. They even pre-install Antutu 4 benchmark app that seems to get a decent 60,000 benchmark, however if you try and upgrade Antutu, the upgrade fails.

As I said, I have a tablet that is actually good enough for the job at a pretty good price. The 720P screen is not bad at all and the construction quality seems fine. Speakers a bit tinny, but adequate for a cheap tablet. I have heard that the screen glue can start to separate with time. 

I am requesting a refund. The seller has offered $15, but unless I get $60 back, I am just going to put in an official dispute and claim 100% refund as it is fake. You do not have to return fake items.

The seller doesn't have my A$123 deal any more, but they are offering a 2560x1600 model instead for about A$160 

What I did notice with the new Dongpad offers is that are no longer specifying the CPU, GPU. If I was a bit smarter, I could have noticed that an Armv7 MT8752 with a Mali-400MP GPU is impossible. Also in my ad, one of the photos showed Android 7.0 with API build 22. Also impossible. The API has to be at least build 24 for 7.0.

[amspire]

The seller seems to have accepted my offer of a $60 refund.

I will still be paying $63 for a comprehensively faked tablet and so I think I am being generous. As I said, after all that, it is still a reasonable 10" tablet with 4G phone and GPS so I am happy.

The seller said he would "talk to the factory" on Monday about future tablets. I think I have scared him since he can be forced to accept a full refund with no returns.

[Mr. Scram]

I think you are being very generous indeed. I thought the things wasn't that cheap either, but I hadn't realized the Australanian dollar isn't doing great at the moment.

[IanMacdonald]

In general, Chinese manufacturers can be a source of incredibly good value products, or unspeakable horrors. Been buying some components from China recently, and most have been up to spec and amazingly cheap. The odd one or two were not, buy hey, at the price I paid I can live with that.

Main area I'd avoid is anything safety critical. Most are perfectly OK, but the issue is that you can't be sure. 

The likes of Dell get their gear made in China anyway. So basically it's a question of finding the manufacturers who turn out decent products,

[Bud]

The seller said he would "talk to the factory"

 

[Mr. Scram]

In general, Chinese manufacturers can be a source of incredibly good value products, or unspeakable horrors. Been buying some components from China recently, and most have been up to spec and amazingly cheap. The odd one or two were not, buy hey, at the price I paid I can live with that.

Main area I'd avoid is anything safety critical. Most are perfectly OK, but the issue is that you can't be sure. 

The likes of Dell get their gear made in China anyway. So basically it's a question of finding the manufacturers who turn out decent products,

Make no mistake, the Chinese can manufacture excellent equipment. They've made most of the stuff you have in your house, including all the name brand and high quality stuff. It's just a question of demand and supply. If people only pay for crap, they will gladly manufacture crap for you. Most people don't understand that you rarely negotiate on price, but mostly on quality. If you reduce the price, it's just the quality that gets reduced.

That being said, I will buy a lot of stuff from China directly, but like you, nothing safety critical. That includes anything on mains. I will not jeopardize the safety of myself and the ones around me to save a buck.

[ajb]

The likes of Dell get their gear made in China anyway. So basically it's a question of finding the manufacturers who turn out decent products,

It's not just a matter of finding those manufacturers, it's also a matter of bringing enough business to the table that you can demand certain terms.  If you're looking to get a hundred of your $50 kickstarter widgets made or something you're going to have a hard time.  If you're building millions of PCs, you're in a whole different league and can expect a whole different level of service. 

There are a number of contract manufacturers now who do their production in China, but do sales/management/engineering/purchasing etc in Europe or North America.  These can be a good compromise between the domestic outfits that do great work and are easy to work with but charge an arm and a leg, and the vast legion of Chinese manufacturers, who may or may not do good work, but are almost always more difficult to work with, and are almost impossible to vet or to hold accountable if something goes wrong.

[Mr. Scram]

It's not just a matter of finding those manufacturers, it's also a matter of bringing enough business to the table that you can demand certain terms.  If you're looking to get a hundred of your $50 kickstarter widgets made or something you're going to have a hard time.  If you're building millions of PCs, you're in a whole different league and can expect a whole different level of service. 

There are a number of contract manufacturers now who do their production in China, but do sales/management/engineering/purchasing etc in Europe or North America.  These can be a good compromise between the domestic outfits that do great work and are easy to work with but charge an arm and a leg, and the vast legion of Chinese manufacturers, who may or may not do good work, but are almost always more difficult to work with, and are almost impossible to vet or to hold accountable if something goes wrong.

From what I've heard, you need to understand the local culture and customs, and preferably have a man on the ground. Without either, a lot of misunderstandings arise, or assumptions are made that are reasonable to a local, but absolutely ludicrous for someone less familiar with the way things typically go. Things obvious to us are not taken into consideration there, and vice versa.

Big companies just set up shop there. If you do small batches, getting this right is a lot harder.