Poke5!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Renate

Another stupid question:
If ordering from https://shop.boox.com/ for delivery in the US, how do they ship (which provider) and do you get a choice?

According to the website you linked, the Boox ships from their US warehouse. No idea who they used to delver.

[jnieland]

Originally Posted by Renate

Another stupid question:
If ordering from https://shop.boox.com/ for delivery in the US, how do they ship (which provider) and do you get a choice?

The two times (Sep 2022 and Jan 2023) I ordered something from Boox.com they shipped it with UPS/USPS.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by jnieland

The two times (Sep 2022 and Jan 2023) I ordered something from Boox.com they shipped it with UPS/USPS.

Thanks! I'm torn between ordering a new Poke5 or a spare Poke3.
I don't like that we don't have a Firehose (EDL) loader for the Poke5.
These small, thin readers have really thin batteries which means it's not easy to even find replacement cells (batteries without connectors).
I'd like to find a Kindle replacement battery since they seem more popular.

[Renate]

Well, I ordered the Poke5. It should be here Thursday or so.
I'm not really expecting it to replace my Poke3 but I didn't want to miss the party.
Super partitions and stuff make it more tedious to do a Magisk-less root.

[Renate]

I just got my Poke5 today.
I unboxed it, opened it up and found the EDL test points within 30 minutes.
I'll have to see if I can find a Firehose loader for this.
If you disassemble this be very careful of the USB Type C connector as it relies on the case itself for physical strength.
The battery cell is the same as the Poke3, a size 255875 = 2.5 x 58 x 75 mm although the plug is different and no thermistor.

Edit: Ok, it's cute and small, but half the darn weight is all the magnetics to make the (also) heavy magnetic cover work.

Edit^2: The Poke5 can detect an "EDL cable". Whether that's detected in the PBL or the xbl abl is another question. That means if you totally brick it then just an EDL cable might not work.

Edit^3: I don't know what they've done (yet) but the fonts are much bigger than on the Poke3 for the same thing.

[Renate]

Wow, that's a real disappointment. It's USB 2, not USB 3.1 (like the Poke3).
Ok, you can argue that the difference is negligible, but it's still one more corner cut.

Well, in any case that means you can use your skinny USB 2 Type C cable and not the beefy USB 3 cable that might stress the connector.

And that font thing needs looking into...

I did, it's that stupid "App optimization" with a density default of 350 DPI (on a 300 DPI screen).

Ah! There's the new? "Master switch". You set it to a slash through it to disable all so-called enhancements.
The worst of these is the one that turns a black line on the left half of the screen to a full line.
That wrecks havoc on my progress bar on my reader.

ALSO, the bezel eats quite a few pixels of the display, even more than the Poke3.
I'll have to come up with some numbers on that.

[mergen3107]

So many regressions, ugh

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by mergen3107

So many regressions, ugh

What hardly anyone needs!
But SD! Magnetic cover!

[Renate]

Originally Posted by mergen3107

So many regressions, ugh

I believe that many of these warts are apparent in the stock Poke3.
It's just that I've been mostly Onyx-free for so long and forgot it all.

The issues of the overscan are worse than the Poke5.
I'll be making an app to more easily analyze/quantify overscan.

Closer examination shows that both the Poke3 and the Poke5 have an overscan of about 6 pixels on all sides.

[mergen3107]

Yeah, but I mean in general, CPU performance and storage degradation with all these quad core CPUs and slower speed eMMC recently in Leaf 2, etc

[Renate]

Originally Posted by mergen3107

Yeah, but I mean in general, CPU performance and storage degradation with all these quad core CPUs and slower speed eMMC recently in Leaf 2, etc

Yeah, you're right.
They already had the dumb Poke (Poke 4 light), they were supposed to release a way better one.

[Renate]

I just noticed that they changed the way they control the front light on the Poke5.
I'm not sure what other models this affects.
I have my Lights.apk mini-utility and that doesn't work. It needs investigating.

In other news, I added my magnetic reed switch for getting into EDL mode.
Unfortunately the magnetic case is so strong that it activates it.
So if you want to do a normal reboot you have to remove the case.
Oh, well.

And, we're still looking for a Firehose loader for QCS2290 a/k/a QCS_AGATTI a/k/a SCUBAPIIOT.

Edit: Oh and they gummed up the fonts, making "regular" bolder, OnyxCustomFont-EN-Regular.ttf

[Renate]

So, the bad news:
The Poke5 QCS_AGATTI, QCS2290 is a (poor) cousin of SDM662.
The Poke5 has Secure Boot enabled so EDL will not work without a Firehose Loader directly from Onyx.
The hash is d40eee56f3194665 ... and despite the fact that there are two Firehose loaders that say they are hashed that, they are otherwise.

The (normal) fastboot bootloader is disabled.
The (recovery) fastbootd is there.

[Renate]

The 3.5 update fixed the problem with the bootloader.

Model:  Poke5P
Finger: Onyx/Poke5P/Poke5P:11/2023-11-17_05-41_3.5_801526b7d/6777:user/dev-keys
Link:   http://firmware-us-volc.boox.com/9ba08e866b3617763dadb55a2ccda422/update.upx
Size:   1600986982
MD5:    9ba08e866b3617763dadb55a2ccda422

The Poke5 is not Secure Boot.
The QCS2290 in the Poke5 seems to be part of the SDM662 family which is used in other Onyx (and for which we have Firehose loaders).
The problem seems to be that the QCS2290 uses a special PMIC, the PM4125.
Apparently none of the Firehose loaders in the wild support this.
That's why the SDM662 Firehose loader loads happily but the Poke5 reboots.

[manujedi]

Originally Posted by Renate

The 3.5 update fixed the problem with the bootloader.

Model:  Poke5P
Finger: Onyx/Poke5P/Poke5P:11/2023-11-17_05-41_3.5_801526b7d/6777:user/dev-keys
Link:   http://firmware-us-volc.boox.com/9ba08e866b3617763dadb55a2ccda422/update.upx
Size:   1600986982
MD5:    9ba08e866b3617763dadb55a2ccda422

The Poke5 is not Secure Boot.
The QCS2290 in the Poke5 seems to be part of the SDM662 family which is used in other Onyx (and for which we have Firehose loaders).
The problem seems to be that the QCS2290 uses a special PMIC, the PM4125.
Apparently none of the Firehose loaders in the wild support this.
That's why the SDM662 Firehose loader loads happily but the Poke5 reboots.

I too didn't manage to get any of those firehose loader to work which are on the internet. Although i managed to get mem dumps by booting a kernel which crashes and
then reboots to edl dump mode (or whatever it is called). You get CD_BTDDR.BIN CD_SHIMM.BIN CODERAM.BIN DCC_CFG.BIN DDRCS0_0.BIN FSM_CTRL.BIN IPA_GSI.BIN IPA_IU.BIN IPA_SEQ.BIN MSGRAM.BIN PIMEM.BIN PMON_HIS.BIN load.cmm CD_BTIMM.BIN CD_STRCT.BIN DATARAM.BIN DCC_SRAM.BIN DDR_DATA.BIN FSM_STS.BIN IPA_HRAM.BIN IPA_MBOX.BIN IPA_SRAM.BIN OCIMEM.BIN PMIC_PON.BIN RST_STAT.BIN.
Also boox released two updates. One incremental which clearly did not work to reddit comments (300mb) and now the full one. One possibility to dump the partitions (now of course no longer needed as we have the update) would be to flash a gsi, but i didn't want to risk it.