[azw409]

I also received my Mars yesterday after it had been held up in customs for nearly a week. I ordered it from the Likebook Store on AliExpress and dealt with somebody called Alex who was extremely helpful.

So it arrived with a free a case (2 boxes) and I fired it up - all in Chinese but an option to switch to English. It had about 80% charge so I proceeded to connect it to the internet and it then did a firmware update and restarted in Chinese again. It took a little hunting around to find the Android settings to get it back into English. I enabled the Google Services and after a quite a while and a restart the Play Store appeared - I noticed the installation package was in the /sdcard directory ready for install.

I installed a few apps no problem - Kindle, Moon Reader Pro, Google Play Books all work beautifully. I installed Chrome and even watched a video on YouTube in A2 mode and it played and was viewable. Very like the magic newspapers in Harry Potter !

I am completely blown away by this device. Previously I've owned a Kindle Touch, Kobo Touch (upgraded to Android) and an Onyx Boox M96C. I really thought the Onyx was going to be the answer to what I wanted but it was too slow, unresponsive, low-res and it was just painful to use. This device fixes all of those issues - it's sharp, clear, very responsive and runs Android apps flawlessly.

So, the built in reader isn't good, the launcher is good but can only use the built-in reader so fatally flawed. I tried KOReader and RelaunchX and they didn't work particularly well together. RelaunchX just shows files instead of books with covers and then KOReader shows the last book you read rather than the one passed from the launcher. KOReader is also extremely slow when opening a new book, although works well when open.

So I settled on Moon+ Reader Pro which I also use on the Kobo Touch. This opened large EPUB's and even a huge scanned PDF very quickly and allowed for zooming to get sensible margins and then handled page turns effortlessly keeping the margins so no need to rezoom and pan on every page. So Now I just need a very basic launcher with just app icons, time and date, and a Wifi on/off button and I'm happy. All of the reader apps have their own library management features so it's unnecessary for the launcher to try and do this. The launcher and the reader reminded me very much of the Onyx platform so I suspect the same devs develop this stuff.

I am delighted with this device, it's a pleasure to use. I don't think I'll be using the built-in launcher and reader so I have no complaints about the poor software, the base Android system works very well indeed.