Alright, I'm at the end of my 30 day return period, so it's going back tonight. Seeing that similar tablets have dropped close in price, and realistically, it's just one sluggish turd, I'm going to cut my losses for now. It would have potentially made a decent xbmc solution with the minihdmi..
I played around with various firmwares, but wasn't able to get touchscreen working, given my limited linux experience.
Someone posted in that thread that it loaded the gt811 module for them, but I couldn't get it to load for some reason.
The best I was able to do with "foreign" firmware was use the one listed on Craig's website. I used PhoenixCard to flash it. Of course, it gets stuck on the bootscreen, and developer mode is disabled. I then flashed Gooseberry in startup mode. This allows the device to boot using the Gooseberry kernel. Of course, touch/rotation etc won't work, but this allows you to use adb (can't remember if dev is enabled by default or if I had to plug in a usb keyboard). From here, I flashed the stock kernel, bootloader, etc, maintaining the system partition of the Craig website firmware.
The problem is the website firmware does not have the gt811 kernel module for our touchscreen, so I had to add them. Now, it's able to boot using the stock kernel that comes with the phone, and the Craig website system partition + touchscreen modules. Touchscreen, rotation, wifi, camera all work. However, there are some differences with the website ROM.. It has an option for autobrightness that doesn't work. The camera orientation seems to be wrong. Everything else seems fine but I haven't done much testing. I was more focused on trying to get gt811.ko to load in other ROMs like cm9.
At this point, I'm bricking it again with the website flash and returning it.
Good luck to anyone who's interested in adding gt811, and whatever is necessary for the camera, g-sensor, etc.
Perhaps with support for higher voltages and thus higher frequencies, as well as a different firmware obviously, the device can be slightly more usable. As it stands stock with gapps, it's really just a complete disaster in my opinion.
FWIW, the D2pad seems to have pretty similar hardware, and potentially the same touchscreen in the xxx9xxx version, so that may be worth a look. At the least, with the way the bootloader reads the sdcard for upgrades, it's near impossible to permabrick, and really easy to get up and running again, so experiment away! Again, the gt811 module seems to load for others on the d2pad firmware (on an actual d2pad obviously, but that shouldn't really matter..), so I'm not sure what's up. I always get an operation not permitted when trying to insmod. Permissions are set properly, and it's rooted obviously. The only other module that the stock firmware has that the website one doesn't is ssd253x-ts.ko.. another touchscreen driver. I can insmod this one no problem, but it doesn't look like that's the touchscreen used in my device. Maybe there are other cmp741e's that use it??
Just another tip, although I'm sure if this is your thing to do, you've got better tools: WinMerge is a nice free tool to compare directories/files and show differences. I used it to compare a dump of the website /system vs the stock one.
