Sometimes it pays to be persistent. After getting a rain check, I was told that the local Kmart would be getting stock last week. I kept checking with the store all last week, but no Gentouch. Last night, on a whim, I drove over there again.
The head of the electronics dept. told me he didn't have any and didn't know when/if they would get any. He also told me that if they did have any, that someone would have called me, as I had a rain check.
I asked him to check the computer to see if any arrived on the last supply truck. Instead, he disappeared into the stock room. Several minutes later, he is at the register with a Gentouch in hand. Says he only found the one. Sometimes being persistent and annoying pays off
After a brief charge, I played around with the unit a bit last night. I will be applying the recently released patches and doing a more thourough test over the next few days. Today was wasted, as I was ill.
Below are my initial impressions so far. I'll have more to add later.
Although the case is all plastic, the build quality looks good. I know some othes complained of bad fitting pieces, but I put this down to typical Chinese OEM quality control. Admittedly, I only have a sample of one, but this thing looks to be better made than many Chinese made products in this price range.
As for overall quality, a good comparison would be to my jetBook. When it first came out, some here called it a piece of plastic crap. Now there seem to be many happy jetbook owners about (me included). I find the Gentouch to be built as well as the jetbook, which cost me more money.
My only real complaint about the physical design or fit of this device is the MicroSD slot. The cutout for the slot is too deep (front to back). When I first put in a card, I put it into the space between the card socket and the plastic case. Thankfully, it didn't fall inside. I managed to pry it out and insert it properly. The metal contacts on the card face towards the screen. The card slot is all the way forward, toward the screen. The card socket sits slightly below the cutout, so you will probably need something smaller than your finger to push the card in until it latches (clicks).
I would have preferred a full-size SD card, instead of a Micro-SD. As large as this tablet is, an SD could have been used.
Some have said that the back gets hot, near the battery. While charging, the back did get warm (not hot). When running on battery, I did not notice that it was particularly warm.
Being a former Nokia N800 user, I found the response of the resistive screen to be quite good. I thought it was more sensitive than the N800 was. One of the recently released patches is supposed to make this even better. I'll let you know. True, you will not be using a gosamer light touch as some claim for a capacitive screen (I haven't tried one of those yet). However, I had no trouble with using a quick flick of my finger to do page turns while reading a book.
As for the software not being what it should, that is true. Someone did rush this thing out. The recently released patches do address some of these issues. The patches that address USB connectivity to a PC don't help me, as I have Win7, 64 bit. There are supposed to be 64 bit versions released mid month. In the mean time, I'll try things on a laptop with WinXP.
I don't want to give the impression that the Android software is totally useless. In fact, most things work just fine. Once the Market, USB, rotation and other little issues get fixed, things will be quite useable.
There is one small annoyance, but it may be that Android is supposed to work this way. This is my first Android device, so I'm not sure. The icons for WiFi, battery, etc at the top of the screen don't seem to be overly useful. Sure, they change color to indicate state, but they don't seem to do anything else. On my N800 and on previous Win Mobile devices, tapping or pressing on such status icons would either pop up with additional information (battery charge %) or take you to the settings for that device. On this tablet, I get none of that. Is this normal?
I haven't done a battery test yet. Last night, after a quick charge, I read for about two hours and the battery icon still showed all green. Of course, I don't know how accurate that icon is. I plan on testing the runtime after a full charge. Stay tuned.
That's it for now.