[nicabod]

Rite Aid had Craig tablets and netbooks on sale of $88, and I couldn't resist. They'd sold out of netbooks; decided to have a look at the tablet. They let me charge the tablet enough in the store to see that it basically worked; it did.

Being a total novice to tablet computing, I explored it for a while, and decided to try the unlock pattern instead of a password. More later about that.

The screen resolution is apparently 135 px/inch on one axis, and maybe 145 px/inch on the other; the pixels are not quite square. I love the high resolution! Screen font is excellent; looks very nice, and is very readable.

First, peeking in via Security, it's plain that somebody has done a lot of work; somewhere, there's a list of what's allowed, and the details are impressive.

However, I found that when I made a Color Note, I couldn't put it where I wanted, and couldn't figure out how to transfer it to my main computer. There were numerous such frustrations.

I sorely missed right-click menus!

Hardware seems quite decent (I have photos of the innards). I opened it up, but the latches at the end opposite the buttons weren't meant to release, only engage, and I broke a delicate rectangular loop.

Once you remove the tiny screws, it would be nice to have a Mac case cracking tool (no longer used?). The back side of some table knives is a long wedge that you can slide. Once open, do be very careful! The screen subassembly is amazingly heavy (maybe so it won't warp, even a wee bit, and maybe just for ballast, so the complete device will give no competition whatsoever to the MacBook (Macbook?) Air.

The screen subassembly is only just held in place by latches molded into the black plastic bezel; it comes loose too easily. If you do open yours, for Heaven's sake, be very careful that the heavy screen subassembly doesn't stress the flat flexible cables! They are durable, but don't press your luck.
(There is no connector; cable is attached at both ends.)

Two flexible flat cables connect the screen to the main board; the narrow one is for the touch sensor, and the wide one is for the display. The display flex cable has a major, serious rearrangement of the connections between the main board and the electronics inside the screen subassembly. Perhaps they chose to use a different screen, and had that complicated transition instead of a major re-do of the main board layout. (Neither is cheap...)

Even with poor vision (mine's OK, if I don't sit in front of a CRT too much!),
it's really easy to see the Rockchip CPU. The circuit board looks quite decent; not junk. The small wireless board is separate, with an antenna pattern etched onto its circuit board.

The Li battery takes up about 60% or so of the total "footprint"; it's to the left, landscape, mechanical buttons to the right. The main board is maybe 1/3 of the total area.

With luck, the images will be placed where I expect them to go.

[Edit, after posting:
It was confoundedly difficult to review and post this. I couldn't find any link or text-area to post my personal introduction, but I might be over-tired. None of my photos appeared, and only a modest fraction of the text is here. I've saved the rest. I'm rather upset that I spent many hours composing (essentially) a good-sized article, and at no time was there any warning, that I could see, that it was too long! Apparently, about 3/4 of the message, and all the photos have been chopped off. I'm going to leave things as they are. I did save the whole text to a file in my machine, and the images are ready to upload again. I was going half crazy with the repeated requests to use the back arrow and reload; that did no good. I'm sorry, folks.]

Here's a view with the bezel (black plastic surround) removed, display just sitting on top of the rest:

The wee speaker (supertweeter size) is at the lower left. Along the bottom edge of the display, somewhat to the right of center, you can see the flex cable for the touch sensor.

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Okay, next: Here's the whole tablet, reduced image. The underside of the display subassembly is plainly to the right; the pretty pattern looks something like galvanizing, a traditional zinc coating on steel that keeps it from rusting. The black part is a plastic insulating sheet so the metal plate doesn't contact the exposed complexity. The light metallic square with modest straight "wrinkles" is the Li battery; the blue, also. It's wide, and thin; typical.

If you feel the underside getting warm, that must be normal. However, it had better be the main board, not the Li battery! The three physical buttons are at the top in this photo.

The wireless board is small, at the left, just slightly more than halfway up.

It's easy to see the flat cables between the main board and the display subassembly. The touch sensor has only four connections, probably to each edge; all the smarts is in the electronics for it. Possible that it rapidly senses the [x] and [y] axes alternately.

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Next image is most of the main board. I didn't reduce it, so that you can see lots of detail. (I hope Craig isn't too unhappy about this! nothing at all to be ashamed of.) No need to point out the Rockchip (which, btw, is apparently a Chinese CPU design (!), probably ARM-based.) The Analogix chip is a "low-power HDMI transmitter"; it must create the HDMI output (or am I confused?), and probably drives the tablet's own display.
<http://www.analogix.com/news/pr/2010_06_24.html>

The hynix chips (one "upside down") are 1 GB dynamic RAMs:
<http://www.ic-on-line.cn/search.php?part=h5ps1g63&stype=part>
Looks as though the 738b has 2 GB of dynamic RAM, although there might be more on the underside; I didn't remove the main board to see.

The big array of 10 copper pads with a label saying "H27A", I would guess, is for some sort of factory test; it might possibly be a port for last-ditch de-bricking when all else fails, but that's just a guess.

I don't know which chip[s] is/are the flash memory.

I cropped the full photo severely to try to stay below the 1.5 MB limit (quite reasonable), and backed off a tad on JPEG quality. I tried to leave the ports visible at the very bottom, so you could see what's inside.

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A different crop of the same image ("w" suffix) shows the wireless transceiver; the sticky black cloth tape on the left covers wiring to keep it in place; it might also conceal something underneath, but I doubt that that's important. The odd square-cornered meandering trace at the right just about has to be the antenna.

===

The whole batch of electronics is in the next photo, much reduced. You can see the blue plastic sheet on the Li battery.