G tablet review-- day one

[justin2042]

I have spent hours and hours trying to find a relatively cheap Android tablet. I started looking at a Flytouch 3 because they are so crazy cheap. A quick trip to a local hhgregg revealed just how horrible resistive based tablets are to use.

When I discovered the G-Tablet i couldn't believe the price tag attached to it.

I got mine on Ebay for $217 with shipping.

The tablet came pre-flashed with the latest Flashback Honeycomb rom. After my initial boot I couldnt get the wifi to get past the "turning on" phase. I rebooted several times and then finally wiped the system and reinstalled Flashback. The wifi started working again.

Many other programs force closed, the whole system seemed kinda delayed. It looked great but it performed badly. I can see the potential honeycomb has but its just not ready yet.

I then switched to Cyanogenmod 7. This is the same setup I already have on my Evo 4G. I felt right at home. The system was much faster. Little to no force closing apps. The games, especially the Tegra 2 designed games SCREAM. No lag at all. I am loving this. Out of the 40 or so apps I have tried only 3 or 4 have had issues.

My suggestions..

Avoid Honeycomb in its current state. Wait until it gets into beta or later. It will be great at some point..just not yet.

Download the Tegra Zone app to stay up to date with the best games for this tablet.

Cyanogenmod works well right now and is very stable.

This tablet is just as fast as it sounds once you put a bit of work into it. I will probably buy a couple more of these as Xmas gifts this year. Definitely recommend it.

 

[vaccdroid]

Agree. I just got one for my Wife and Son. Got it for $200 shipped. its got the power of a $500 tablet for less then half the price. you cant beat that. And honestly if all you do is play games-surff the web - email etc this tablet will be great for a few years. got the speed etc for it.

 

[luvduchovny]

Flashback is only one of several HC roms out there. You might try a different one in the future if you want to play with Honeycomb. The only issues I've had with HC (I'm using GTabcomb Beta 3.2) is the camera doesn't work and flash only works decently in Opera mobile. Otherwise, I use it daily. But different folks use tablets for different things and the beauty of Gtablets are it's easy to flash a new rom to it.

 

[liholdder]

By customizing rom, we can have a lot of fun that locked or limited before. Sometimes, you just find the manufacturer's configuration drives you crazy. So, if it's possible, it's still worth trying a new rom.

 

[gadgetrants]

The tablet came pre-flashed with the latest Flashback Honeycomb rom. After my initial boot I couldnt get the wifi to get past the "turning on" phase. I rebooted several times and then finally wiped the system and reinstalled Flashback. The wifi started working again.

Many other programs force closed, the whole system seemed kinda delayed. It looked great but it performed badly. I can see the potential honeycomb has but its just not ready yet.

Hi Justin! Glad to see you've found a ROM that's working well (Android phone owners seem to be a lot more comfortable with the gTab than other folks).

Please forgive my narrow-minded view of things (I'm not as open-minded as I aspire to be), but I suspect your problems with Flashback were due to inheriting the tablet as-is. If you're comfortable flashing custom ROMs, I'd enthusiastically suggest you go into CWM recovery, make a backup copy of your current ROM--then wipe the gTab TOTALLY clean:

- clear data
- clear the regular and Dalvik caches
- repartition memory to 2048/0

And then give Flashback 7.0 or 7.1 a try. You might also play with Bottle of Smoke (which has worked beautifully for me, but is on-the-shelf development-wise for now).

With a good HC ROM in place, the only major things lacking are camera and hardware acceleration (which is inching toward working). Flash and netflix are good to go, and as you already know, it's a pretty interface.

Sorry for the hard-sell...but I'd love for you to give Flashback or BoS a fresh try and the chance to get a second impression!

-Matt