One of the things I wanted for a while was an Android tablet that could
replace a laptop when traveling with a smaller, lighter device. Because of the sorts of things I do, this meant a 10" screen to have enough screen real estate.
I previously got a 10" tablet from a vendor called Azpen. Azpen has annoyances - they are constantly fiddling with the design and introducing new models, insist in installing bloatware as system apps that can't be uninstalled via normal add/remove, and the one I got ran Marshmallow which I've been unable to find a rooting solution for that worked, so I couldn't remove the crap - just disable it. There was enough storage that I could afford the space the bloat took, but there were other annoyances that would have made me pass on that model had I known what they did that time.
It suffered a hardware failure, so I went looking. eBay had various folks selling pre-owned RCA Viking Pro devices. RCA is long gone, but an outfit called Also seems to own the trademark, and are producing consumer electronics under the RCA brand.
The Viking Pro is a 10" tablet with an included keyboard. It uses a 1.3ghz quad core Mediatek CPU (ARM Cortex7 design), Mali graphics driving a 1280x800 screen, 32GB of internal storage, Wifi, and Bluetooth. It has microUSB and full sized USB ports, an HDMI port, a microSD card slot for external storage, and a separate power connector. The one I got runs Lollipop 5.0. That was deliberate, because I wanted to root it. What I got cost under $40 including shipping.
There were some pleasant surprises. One was that the full sized USB port would recognize and access USB thumb drives and let me transfer data to and from them. As a test, I plugged in a 4 port hub with a USB mouse and three thumb drives, and it saw and used them all. (The keyboard has a touchpad, but I loathe them.) Another was the microSD card slot. The on device manual said it could take up to a 32GB card. On impulse, I inserted a 64GB card I'd gotten for the failed Azpen, and it saw and used it. The 32GB limit is a hardware thing - SDHC slots have that volume size limitation. It appears there was an engineering change to make that an SDXC slot which handles larger volumes, but that never got communicated to the folks who wrote the manual. (The manual
does say specs are subject to change without notice...
)
The device came with preinstalled software, as expected. Some of it was stuff I'd install anyway, like the Chrome browser for Android, and the WPS Office suite. (Oddly, it
also included Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.) Other things included the Opera Android browser, and apps for VUDU, Sam's Club, and Walmart, as well as Google Books/Game/Music etc. Opera, Sam's Club, VUDU and Walmart could just be uninstalled. The others are System apps.
And there were some curiosities. The only thing that the microUSB slot appears usable for is charging. It doesn't recognize anything plugged into it. This seems to be deliberate, to prevent folks from doing things like hooking a desktop to the machine via an OTG adapter, and doing things using ADB to root it.
This meant I couldn't root from the PC as I normally do. I would need one of the on device solutions where you install an apk and it attempts to root. The one available from Kingoroot, my preferred rooting solution, bounced off. The one from competitor King Root worked, but has annoyances. One is that it really wants to install other stuff I don't want/need. Another it that it makes it a chore to find out what has root permissions. A third is dialog boxes saying something wants root but not always saying what it is. A fourth is not remembering something has been granted root and asking again. And last, it wants to establish connections and phone home back to Shenzen. (That was easy enough to counter. Since I have a rooted device, I could run AFWall+, a GUI interface to the Linux IPTables firewall function, and create a rule to block outgoing access from King Root.)
If you can install another superuser app (my preference is Chainfire's SuperSu), you can uninstall King Root and still have a rooted device. But King Root camps out on the su binary and won't let SuperSu replace it. Kicking King Root off so you can install SuperSU is possible, but requires a complex process which I am exploring now.
The attached photos are it set up on the workbench, and a screenshot. I use Nova Launcher as my launcher, and am a minimalist.
So far, with quirks as noted, I'm happy.
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Dennis