PENDO brand tablet fails to turn on. Suggestions? PNDPP4MT9G3 AMLOGIC 8762

[wilfred]

/.

[ovnr]

Suggestions? Chuck it in the bin. It's a shitty $7 tablet.

[rrinker]

 Take it apart? Might be interesting just HOW shitty it is in order to be sold for a mere $7. Or even the original price of $10.

[Muttley Snickers]

The neighbour recently found one on the nature strip more than likely being discarded and he couldn't get it going so I ended up with it, I found that the dc connector on the plug pack was dodgy so I used another one I had and still no go, left it on charge overnight and still nothing but whilst trying to get it to go I contorted the tablet and low and behold the thing booted up and has worked ever since, it looks good but unfortunately just another useless piece of crap, It was a Telefunken thing.

I have an older Acer Iconia A500 which I paid a fortune for only to find out a few months after purchase that they dropped support for them, anyway I have over 500 product manuals and site diagrams on it in pdf so for that alone it is handy. It's a bit of a shame that so many of these gadgets get chucked out and aren't put to good use afterwards as say a DRO, remote TE display or something else useful.

[amyk]

You probably can't buy the parts individually for $7...

[krivx]

You probably can't buy the parts individually for $7...

It's possible you can't ship them to a recycling plant for $7/ea either, so blowout sales like this make sense sometimes.

[retiredcaps]

Before I open it up has anyone got some ideas about likely sources of the fault.

I'm not an Android expert, but many of them operate the same way with respect to recovery mechanisms.  You power on the tablet on, holding the volume down and up at the same time (or something like that) and then it goes into recovery mode.  You may have to reformat or wipe the cache directory/partition as something might be corrupt?

Something like this?

http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/use-recovery-mode-android/

PS. At $7, I would have bought as much I as could.  They are useful despite running on very old Android 4.1 code. I would NEVER use them for anything like banking, or anything https, etc as there are hundreds of vulnerabilities in 4.1 code, but for the odd Plants vs Zombies, Kingdom Rush, etc.

[retiredcaps]

BTW, if there is a physical unrepairable defect with this tablet that can't turn on, at least you have spare parts and a battery for the other 3.  You can't buy a replacement battery for $7.

PS. Too bad Target couldn't get their act together in Canada.  I did, however, get some good bargains during the closeout sale.

[Alex Eisenhut]

BTW, if there is a physical unrepairable defect with this tablet that can't turn on, at least you have spare parts and a battery for the other 3.  You can't buy a replacement battery for $7.

PS. Too bad Target couldn't get their act together in Canada.  I did, however, get some good bargains during the closeout sale.

The only good thing that came out of that debacle is that the Canadian Tire near my place moved into the old Target location, Canadian Tire is trying to turn into a kind of IKEA with tools. Very odd, but I picked up a ten-pack of microfiber cloths for 8$, not bad.

[Muttley Snickers]

I searched for faulty Pendo pad shortly after you first posted and then got lost in other peoples stories and there were quite a few, it would seem that these are a problematic device and one fellow even has a truckload of faulty units for sale on Ebay as a bulk buy if that's any guide.

I don't need another tablet but do now need a microscope or similar for some of the finer work, will these tablets work as a monitor with say a USB webcam or borescope to act as a stand alone viewer, I don't have either of these USB cameras around so can't test this option.     

[Muttley Snickers]

I think it may have been the same Ebay seller although the other day he or she had 30 x 7 inch units for $80 and 10 x 10 inch units for $50 and there were other faulty bulk buy listings around, the tablets I have here incorporate a full size USB port for either a mouse, keyboard or thumb drive but I don't know if they have support for these types of USB cameras below and it may be brand or model specific anyway, if they did work they might be handy.

I did find a video which shows them working on a tablet but if you read the comments it seems to be the loaded application that is the key and they may not work at all, I remember looking into this once before and came up against a hurdle so gave it a miss, anyway this is not getting your Pendo pads working and I was thinking more about other uses for discarded tablets.   

[amyk]

Look for a serial port.