I’ve ordered a very cheap tablet from China, for about $85 including shipping. I  did this, so I could see if anything arrives from there at all, and also to see if it arrives at all.

I was not surprised to receive it in three weeks time, even though it had 30 working days to arrive.

It came in a rather unimpressing package, with my name and address printed on a piece of paper torn on the edges, affixed with liberal amounts of tape.

The box is just plain white with a very low quality picture of the device. It is called MID (this week probably) but it’s one of those cheap things you get rebranded under several aliases.

The tablet feels plastic, and quite heavy. The rear cover feels empty and hollow. The buttons on the sides are quite small. The painted arrow on thevback button on the front panel scratched off in mere hours! Well, one can’t expect to get a Galaxy Tab for this money. 🙂

As it came with the Chinese market and complete lack of Google apps, I decided to flash it as soon as possible. It took 4 hours after receiving it, that I just killed the original firmware and replaced it with a version of the Uberoid release found here.

After the upgrade, and the market fix described on the page, the device suddenly  became more interesting. The icons seem to be oversized on the market, and so are several icons on the screen resulting in a broken feeling. I really want to change the icon packs back, as the “Honeycomb theme” makes me puke.

Titanium backup does not seem to work on the rooted device, so I guess I’ll have to live without. The image comes with a so far unknown AppMonster to do it’s job. I’ve replaced ADW Launcher, and Prolauncher that came in the image with the GO Launcher Ex, I use on my ZTE. As it turns out it is faster on this piece as well.

It will still take some time for me to see if it was a sensible idea to get it or not.

Update

The resistive display is very unresponsive, but it might be because of the capacitive display of my phone. Talking of which, the cheap ZTE Blade is far superior to this tablet in both manufacturing and performance wise. There’s a significant lack of responsiveness on the display edges caused by the ignorant design.
I forgot to mention, that there was a stylus included in the box, that is very obviously designed for a mobile phone, there is no place to stick it in the tablet however. The power supply comes with an attachable European socket adapter, but with a cord no longer than 50 cm.
I’ve reverted the ROM to the Vestinous 1.3 release, that’s not infested with the Honeycomb wannabe theme,now the icon sizes are normal, and I can still see the market. The performance is still tragic, it should be able to run at 800MHz but feels less, maybe it’s just the limited memory.
I’ve later updated to the more stable Singularity ROM.