Hi, it's tear down Tuesday again Now normally I wouldn't tear apart yet another eBook reader I've done plenty of them, but I just couldn't resist with this one. especially to tear down a one hung low brand. eBook reader which this one is but I got the thing For 30 bucks retail, that's 30 bucks Australian at Tricky Dicks retail price got to be kidding me. So I just couldn't resist What's inside a you know, a $30 ebook R It not only 30 bucks, but it's color.

It's full color. TFT Display: no sorry, it's not color you know e in uh display used in the Kindles and everything else. It is just a regular TFT But 30 bucks retail. Where the How the hell can they sell this? 30 bucks retail? You got to be kidding me.

Tricky Dicks would be buying this for 15 bucks. Absolute tops. You can probably buy it on the streets of Hong Kong for $10 Unbelievable. what's inside it.

can't resist tearing the damn thing apart. Now this is the My Gear brand and I think that might be like a Tricky Dick um, you know, sort of inhouse kind of name. I'm not entirely sure it was sold by Big W as well as a much higher price. and it was originally sold by Dick Smith at a much higher price, but it wasn't on special at 30 bucks.

that was its new retail price I Think it might even be discontinued now anyway, but it goes under other uh Brands as well as you would imagine. um I From what I can find the identical unit or identical looking unit is available as the Um Sky Tech brand and also the blip. The blip color uh eBook reader Um, but I believe some of those have better inbuilt functionality like like an FM radio or something like that which I don't think this one has. but anyway, um, it.

You know, look at the funky looking case that comes in, you know it's it's not just uh, 30 bucks in just a white cardboard box with a you know little slip of paper comes in a beautiful case like this. Yes, it is a lovely purple. It does come in many different fruity colors I Love it. Um, but this is the only one they had in stock.

comes with a protective Pu, imitation leather case and uh old. R Of the specs here it is. Where is it? 2 gig internal memory uh 7in TFT color display light licensed licensed Adobe Reita software Woohoo! An 800x 400 uh color screen, rechargeable polymer battery? That's what I'm concerned about. For 30 bucks, you got to W worry what's inside the damn battery? Are they using it as you know, as a lost leader to uh uh, export toxic chemicals or something like that? Oh I don't trust this battery in here any further than I can throw it.

um, 8 hours of constant uh reading up to 5 hours of video play back. So they claim yeah for the first two uses and it supports up Pdf text ePub RTF HTML Moby and Pdb whatever that is. Um, and it supports MPEG MP4 uh, Avi WMV and all those and support Mp3s and Wavs and JPS and uh, bit maps and gifts and Pngs and all sorts of other stuff. So gee, I don't know.

You know it's probably going to be a load of crap I Don't expect much from this at all, but I'll give it a quick little uh rundown of how the thing works and then we'll rip it apart Beauty All right, let's see what we get in the box with this heaper thing. Hey, it's pretty pretty heavy. Oh, that's pretty crusty. I Don't like that, it's it.

feels really quite heavy. 311 G It's an absolute monster. but uh, I guess it needs a big battery in there to power this uh t F display in this thing cuz it's going to be an AB absolute, uh, battery hog. It's going to be no book.

you wouldn't use it as just a reader. You really need an eink display device, so let's peel off our oh man, that doesn't feel good. That's really tough to pull off. Don't know how much static I'm generating there, but just look at the uh, the purple, the horrid terrible plastic on it.

Cheap as chips, spongy buttons. The layout is just atrocious and really the you know the work experience. uh kid in the Chinese Factory has clearly designed this thing. There it is my gear model number b102 DC 5 volts at 1 amp made in China of course reset button speaker.

We've got a oh it's got a mic built in There we go. You can actually record with this sucker. We've got a headphone A slot there A DC jack a tiny looking pissant DC jack there. We've got a Micro SD card slot easily accessible and um, the mini USB Presumably it charges from the mini B as well, but done.

Yeah, it's just a horrible design, It feels tacky and really it's it's. not sturdy at all. it twists and turns. Don't like it.

but I guess you can't expect much for 30 bucks retail, right? So I'm going to press the power button here and what fail doesn't work out of the box? Either that or it takes sometime to boot up. I don't know going to have to charge this thing crap and I'm guessing there are some people who care. what else we get in the Box here? Oh God I don't know how you open this thing. Jeez, it's almost too hard.

Ah, come on. No fail. Product packaging fail No A They' stuck it down The bastards. Bloody hell, what have they done? This is ridiculous.

Oh look at the purple. Look at the purple case. Oh and I Got to tell you this: uh PU leather case is PU it uh not only matches the color, but it matches the quality of the plastic. It just makes your skin crawl.

Really, We have the cheapest crapp headphones money can buy and we have a mini be woohoo and a couple of Bits of Paper Ah, Who cares. Aong must read. It is most important that you follow these instructions. You must charge your eBook reader for 8 hours before use.

Well curiously I just plugged in the charger and it popped up and said uh, charging, please do not use and then it uh and then it turned itself on. Go figure. What? what's going on here and it does show the battery charge as full. What the? And as for the TFT screen itself, it is exactly what I I'd expect from a one hung low brand you know, $30 TFT you know? TFT and a $30 eBook reader? it's you know it's really reminds me of, you know, the you know, like sort of 1980s early 90s sort of TFT technology.

It's not that great at all and I swear it's almost as if it's flickering. Maybe that's my imagination, but yeah, it's not that great to read the. uh, the angle is not terrific at all. It's going to be hard to get on camera, but I basically yeah, I'm I'm pretty much seeing what's on camera.

there. you turn it to an angle you know, 45 and you cannot read it like that and uh, down is I can still read that but uh, it's not that great and down like that is not that great either. But front on, you know it does the job for a 30 Buck eBook Reader: I guess but you wouldn't read it for use it. For reading ebooks, you'd be crazy.

Got to use E in and the menu system is okay I guess but geez. I don't know. Let's play something and it comes with 100 free ebooks. Whoopy do they're just uh Project Gutenberg ones in uh text format.

but there you go. I Just plugged it in uh to the USB and it does appear just as a direct uh Drive No problems at all. This no other subdirectories. There's just these text files in it.

That's it All right? I've copied some files over to it. Let's go into ebook here: I Assume you press M to go in there and uh, no, it's just showed up with all these text. Bloody ones. Ah, not far too many.

the P ah, the PDF's showing up there, but it hasn't shown up with a different icon. it's just showed up the same icon as the txt. That's hopeless. So I've got the uh, let's say the keyly low measurement.

uh, Handbook here. let's open that up and uh, see there it is. There's the keyly lowlevel measurements Handbook seems to render seems to have rendered okay, but uh, I'm not sure I mean this is uh, formatted for a slightly larger size I think so, uh, possibly, but that's you know it's it's readable. Page turning is pretty slow on this.

um PDF it's not that great, but uh, it. It's got the Adobe Reader software so you'd expect it to uh, you expect it to work. It continues to show your battery um gauge down here in this uh status display down the bottom. So how do we get out of that? do we go? Menu: Yeah, no flip, bre brows whatever H Who cares I don't want this thing to be a review.

One quick test: let's see if we can play some video. I Put two of my I put three of my Evev blogs on there. It's only recognized two probably based on the Uh file name. So let's uh, let's give that a go, shall we? file format error: What Fail.

These are H264 um and Peg for no, can't play either of them. You got to be kidding me. That's crap. It's a standard MP4 like H264 MP4 garbage.

Well, I did actually get the video working I Had to uh, rename my Um Podcast version of my video I had to, uh, give it the MP4 extension. So this is the Podcast version. This is the 480 by 270 Uh version, but it would not play the Uh HD version of the same video rendered with with the same program handbrake. Crazy.

And there's no volume control on the thing and you can't You know you've got to really view it face on to get, um, to get a good view of the thing. It's oh man, it's barely acceptable. Well I think I've had enough of this steaming pile of dog turd? Really? I I Couldn't be bothered reviewing this thing. so let's tear it apart.

I See two, uh, little white, uh gunked up things there? I'm assuming that if I dig those out, there's going to be two screws under there. perhaps? or I might have to get my spudger out. maybe around the outside? Let's give it a go. All right, it looks like we're going to have to get in here with the spudger somehow because it doesn't.

Uh oh, there we go. Yeah, it's going to. it's going to pop open I Think we get along. I'm not being too gentle with this thing cuz I Really don't give a toss about it.

just want to get the thing open and look at the goodness or not so goodness as the case will likely be inside this. Rock Bottom Price one hung low eBook Reader: If anyone knows what price you can get this on the streets for, please let like in in Hong Kong or something. please let me know because I'd love to you know is someone's at Akie Harbor or something like that one of the markets. or if you can see what you can get these bloody ebook readers for because they're going to be good for part like you could, uh, you know you might be able to uh hack the TFT out of this thing or something.

Here we go. Tada There we go. Hey speaker, who cares? There it is. The first thing I'm surprised about, they've actually bothered with the shielding.

You know, they've got a couple of little uh sponges here and over here to uh to connect to the shield on the front side of the case there, but the batter's just, uh, stuck down at any old angle there. I'm actually surprised at the size of that. I Expected a much bigger battery cuz this thing weighs a fair bit and of course, being a, you know, a power hungry color TFT I Expected, um, it to be quite significantly larger. like take up that whole area or something like that.

But anyway, we've clearly got one main device down here we'll take a look at. We've got um, the uh, flash memory and the uh, Dam and uh, space for a a second, uh, memory there and so I find that rather curious. They've got to that trouble for the flat. Flex Four-way flat Flex all the way over.

Do a separate board here and uh, that's just for the tacked power switch on the top and the charging. LED Maybe there was something optional here based on these moldings in the case there? Perhaps who knows. but uh, they've just uh yeah, they've just added expense here. They must have done it for some specific reason.

And there's the battery. Lithium Polymer claims 3.7 volts at ,00 milliamp hours I Wouldn't trust that thing any further than I could crush it without the damn thing exploding. Um, it's there does look to be uh, protection. uh, circuitry in there there, though.

it does look like it has a protection board on there. that's at least a good uh start. so uh, no problems there at all. And if you have a look at that battery protection, uh PCB there they've uh, it looks like they've done that reasonably well.

There's uh, two devices on there, presumably um, over voltage and uh, under voltage. Uh, cutout. so looks like they haven't really. uh, haven't skimped there at all.

I'm very surprised. and they do like put in masking tape on stuff. There's the main flat Flex cable going over to the Uh T TFT display down in there and uh, is is that a yeah, it's a lockin type so you know no problems. I'm not sure why they're putting the uh masking tape on top of that and there's a Powertech brand Pt52 uh Power Management device.

It's basically a single cell lithium ion charger charges at uh 800 or up to 800 milliamp. I think I think it's got a fixed 1.5 mahz um DC to DC converter to generate any uh power rails required for the main device. So yeah, they've chosen certainly not a name brand there, but one of the cheapest Brands they possibly could. And the main device is from Rockchip Uh, you've probably never heard of them, but they're a, um, fairly large, fabulous semiconductor uh maker.

They make devices specifically for uh, multimedia. uh devices like this is is from their 24 20 sorry 2700 series devices which I believe are the older ones designed for multimedia devices. just like um, you know these types of um, you know, sort of tablety uh type ebook readers that can play back video. It's got all the hardware um decoding for all the video and the audio and it's got uh video output uh uh, capability to HDMI as well I believe.

It's got the Uh memory controllers and the whole thing built in. That's why you only need this single chip plus pretty much the uh, the surrounding flash memory and Dam and uh, and you know, not much else really like an output amplifier for the uh speaker and stuff like that. And that's probably about all she wrote. So um, there you go.

It's from Rock chips and uh, it's probably one of the cheapest devices on the market and how they can get the price down on these things. So apparently it's got an Arm 9 processor in it plus a DSP uh core as well. It works at 600 mahz but uh, you know it just says it runs an ARS It's harder to find more information probably if I searched a bit more I could Anyway, if you want to look it up, search for Rock Chip And The RK 2700 series and there's the Samsung Nan flash memory that's uh, 2 Gbits and uh down here it looks like I can see tiny little mits ofit symbol in there so that's a Mitsubishi Dam I presume can't quite read that number. not that it matters.

Looks like they got two Footprints here for some sort of uh alternate device I'm not sure what's going on there, but there's a little uh electric insert uh microphone. there's our headphone uh output socket our DC input jack we can little 32 khz Crystal which is gunked down there. Not terrific, but it is and uh it looks like we got a uh speaker driver here and uh and there's no surprises. it's a one hung low brand in this case.

um this is the audio uh amplifier for the uh speaker and it's an Ft 690m from Fang Tech Love it! Um so I've never heard of them. obviously there's you know hundreds of companies like these in China that you've never heard of and they produce these cheapest chips devices and that's how they can uh get prices so low on these consumer products because they're not going to use like a like a Maxim brand or a TI power amplifier chip one of the big name quality Brands No, they'll use Fang Tech and that's clearly connected to the 32 khz Crystal there. So probably some sort of real time clock I Can't quite read that on the screen here. It's H Ym 856 something? perhaps? something like that.

So maybe, um, yeah, some sort of realtime clock device. maybe that's not built in to the main Rock Chip device and up around near the power supply up here. This is probably uh, the uh power supply for the TFT display or something like that. Some more stuff over there for the Uh battery? that's um, what is that? That's a Pt410? There you go.

That's also a Pte as well. Um, same brand obviously as the DC to DC converter that's actually a Wh Le backlight driver. So that's the backlight for the Uh TFT display. Now, if you take a look at this unpopulated uh, flat Flex footprint they've got there, it's basically um, paralleled up with the other TFT display like that and then goes down into the main device down here.

So um, clearly that's a like a secondary connector design, probably for a different Uh brand, different model. uh TFT display. So whichever ever TFT display they can buy this week I Guess they, uh, they actually populate that footprint instead of the other one and just, uh, change the uh, just move the ribbon cable over and plug it into there. So um, theyve obviously put some uh thought into what second sourcing.

um, some the Uh LCD display for this thing so that they can keep it going I wonder if they still make this? I'm not entirely. Um, sure, but clearly that's a Second Source connector and you'll note the uh, other unpopulated components up here so you can. They could, uh, re-pin this board very quickly in the uh manufacturing process, just load up the components, just, uh, change their, change the program in their pick and place machine to place these components in this connector instead of this connector, and uh, these components over here so you can quickly, um, uh, retool your Uh product and have it roll off the line for whatever available to TFT you display you could buy this week or this month from the local Chinese market. I Guess.

And as you'd expec in these kind of devices, they've just bodged the battery directly across onto the directly across that surface mount component. There, you know they haven't put a proper connector on the board or anything like that. real bodgy stuff. but um, but apart from that, that's probably the Uh one of the oh, they do the same thing for the speaker over there, but apart from that, that's probably probably the boggest thing in this whole thing now.

I Was a little bit curious why they actually had what looks like 2 32 khz watch crystals here and here. one associated with this chip here, and one associated with the Uh Rock Chip the main Rock Chip device. So I figured this must be a higher frequency one cuz they couldn't see a surface mount Crystal anywhere else. So they've that's probably a much higher frequency.

So I'm going to uh, get in there and uh, probe that and take a look. All right here we we go. let's have a look and let's probe the side of that there it is 24 mahz Bingo And of course there would uh be a PLL inside the main Rock Chip device to uh boost it up to the 600 MHz required for the internal processor. So just one main 24 MHz clock I guess they use that um uh, small can device? um, purely because it's the cheap thing they could get cheaper than you know, a good uh quality uh brand external.

um, you know Seos um oscillator module And just in case you are wondering, yes, the other crystal is a 32.768 khz watch crystal. So I'm a little bit surprised this was a better quality. uh A Better Built product than I was imagining. It's not on par with the Kle by any uh, stretch.

really. just in terms of the quality of the fiberglass. PCB the quality of the components. The soldering is not quite as good and uh, stuff like that, but you know it's it's not too bad.

I Expected it to be, um, a bit more slapped together than um, what we've actually found here. So I'm relatively impressed I Still think it's a junky uh product? I I wouldn't recommend you uh, go out and buy one. It's built down to a price and that's how they get it down to a price cuz the Silicon costs money. So once you've got it all integrated once you've done your engineering, once you've got your n cost out of the way for that main device from that fabulous uh Semiconductor Company rock chip.

Um, then you know there's not a huge amount of um cost. you've just got some passive, some power stuff and the memory which you can get from you know, a whole host of different, uh, different suppliers and the uh TFT display and the battery. It's not a huge amount in there, so anyway, it was rather interesting. Bit better than I thought um I'm pretty sure there's no components on the bottom there.

I'm sure it's only going to be a top side. uh, load here. They wouldn't bother. There's plenty of room so there's no reason to put any components on the bottom.

So I don't think I'll bother taking the uh board out, but there you go, that's tear down. Tuesday A one hung low brand eBook reader I Hope you liked it and if you do, please give the video a big thumbs up. And uh, if you want to discuss it, jump on over to the Evev blog Forum Catch you next time Goodbye!.