Just a FYI, got mine yesterday ... the packing looked new and all but the tablet appears to be a return (used)

"settings" soft key isn't working, what should come up on stock ota when I press that soft key?

Anyone else have a problem with one softkey not working?

Doing a factory restore fixed my wireless issues immediately. Angry Birds plays now as well, instead of a blank screen. The tablet did have one FC, but other than its been surprisingly stable. After the factory reset, it looks like the screen pictured on the box instead of the pseudo-Android looking/behaving screen that they are coming shipped with.

At least the thing now works. I guess I'll keep it and start the brain transplant.

Does any other wooter have the stapleshotspot listed in their wifi connection list? It makes me think ViewSonic just repackaged all the staples stocked/returned units and sold them to woot at a great price.
FYI My gtab arrived on 3/30 packaged as new and didn't find anything out of place in the box. There was no initial setup wizard when I started it. It booted to classic home, and had the leaves live wallpaper with angry birds and Flashplayer pre-installed.

illasreenu wrote:Does any other wooter have the stapleshotspot listed in their wifi connection list? It makes me think ViewSonic just repackaged all the staples stocked/returned units and sold them to woot at a great price.
FYI My gtab arrived on 3/30 packaged as new and didn't find anything out of place in the box. There was no initial setup wizard when I started it. It booted to classic home, and had the leaves live wallpaper with angry birds and Flashplayer pre-installed.

I have a feeling this might be the case here too (Staples stock). Mine with all the issues I've listed also didn't give me the initial user setup and license agreement after a few reboots like my both of my coworkers gtablet's did when he powered his up for the second time.

cherman1 wrote:WHAT? I guess that explains the scratches and smudges on mine. I am still puzzled by files preloaded not by the manufacturer but the vendor?

The vendor is the manufacturer. From what I understand, the tablets and accessories were shipped to the US separately and then were updated, tested, packaged and sealed here in the US.

Bobulon wrote:Here's a link for the master directory as a zip i left out the videos that were in there cause they were big. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=X1Q5EKD8

On an unrelated note I'm new to android, still have a dumb phone. I switched to TNT lite is there a way to remove or change the phone softkey on the right, and is there a way to change the icon spacing on the pages they seem really far apart.

Also thanks Roebeet for all the great info and work on the mods.

Thanks! This is a good resource for anyone missing the MASTER apps, all the advertised apps are in there (like Flesh).

If you wipe your device, all you need to do is take this ZIP, extract the apks to a folder on your device and sideload them (using something like Estrongs)

vdoubleuvr6 wrote:I have a feeling this might be the case here too (Staples stock). Mine with all the issues I've listed also didn't give me the initial user setup and license agreement after a few reboots like my both of my coworkers gtablet's did when he powered his up for the second time.

While there is some potential that there are some returns in this batch, it's clearly the exception - so far we've only seen a handful of customers with this issue. If you have this issue, please email us at service@woot.com and we will take care of you.

borntohunt wrote:I've stayed up to date reading every post on all 61 pages of this discussion thread, so I'll try to go back to where that nice person offered a 3389 ZIP file to you & I thought you told him he can freely upload it to megaupload but I cannot remember if he offered us a web link for it just in case he included the MASTER folder of APK's.

Thanks again. I'll update if I can find anything.

EDIT: I noticed that the /system/app/ folder has lots of APK's, but it does not look like what folks have said are in the MASTER folder which I never did look inside when I had it since I did not know what was in it or what it was for.

You can download the 3389 zip file from http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AKIQXM00. As robeet said it doesn't contain the /master folder. I knew all the extra apps could be found at the Market so I only grabbed the weather app and the the notebook app as I wasn't sure about them. I can zip those two and upload them to megauploads if anyone is interested.

clarinetbob wrote:I am going to ask a Jatravartid question...sorry in advance.

When someone says to "reboot" the tablet, how exactly is that done? Just hold the power button in until it shuts down and restarts?

Sorry. I should have said press the power button and turn the GTab off and then press the power button to turn it back on. I never got the correct power off procedure (with the dialog box asking to shut down after pressing the power button) until after I downloaded the 3588 update.

When instructions say to "reboot"...what does that mean? Power-down/power-up? Hold the power button down until it shuts down and then restarts? Or do the power button/volume thing? I'm trying to do the market fix so I can see Firefox as an option, but I still don't see it. Thanks anyone!

clarinetbob wrote:When instructions say to "reboot"...what does that mean? Power-down/power-up? Hold the power button down until it shuts down and then restarts? Or do the power button/volume thing? I'm trying to do the market fix so I can see Firefox as an option, but I still don't see it. Thanks anyone!

Hold the power button button for 3-5 seconds, then choose "shutdown". Then power up as needed.

BigD wrote:While there is some potential that there are some returns in this batch, it's clearly the exception - so far we've only seen a handful of customers with this issue. If you have this issue, please email us at service@woot.com and we will take care of you.

Opps...I emailed the RMA email as I wasn't sure. I will email this service one now and let them know about the RMA one. Thank you for the reply.

First of all I'd like to thank the people in this thread that have been instructing others on how to upgrade their units.

After going through the process I have several observations.

1) I consider myself "fairly" computer literate. It took me about three hours to swap out the software. It took maybe fifteen minutes to install and run clockworkmod. I then followed the instructions to install TNT and had a couple of issues with the instructions. The biggest problem I ran into was putting the ROM on the system. When you download the ROM, it downloads as a .rar file. I was not aware and the instructions did not mention that this file needs to be "unzipped" before it can be used. I put the rar file on the G Tablet and tried repeatedly to get it to install to no avail. You need to download a RAR program that you then use to open the TNT ROM file. Once opened, you now have the "update.zip and recovery folder" you need to install on the G Tablet root directory. None of what I just typed would have made sense to me yesterday so I did learn a few things in the process.

2) There is no password protection for the machine. This is an amazing piece of information that everyone needs to be aware of. I loaded up my email account information and some other personal data into the machine and then went looking for how to lock the unit. You can't. Be aware of this. Make sure if you do use the unit for any forums, email accounts, banking, shopping, etc, that you do not keep your passwords on the unit. If you lose it or it gets stolen, everything on the unit will be there for who ever finds it. Having been a victim of identity theft in the past, this scares the heck out of me and I may not have bought the unit had I known this feature does not exist.

3) Woot is going to get a ton of these returned. The system used as shipped is absolutely terrible. I couldn't get the browser to load more than three pages before crashing. Modified it works great but here is the issue with that. We all assume everyone that bought the tablet is reading this discussion. I'd be willing to bet the vast majority never read the notes, they just bought the unit. Had all ten thousand buyers been participating in this there would be hundreds of pages by now. I'm betting less than 15% read the comments and less than 10% are still referencing this discussion. That means a heck of a lot of people are going to be returning their very poorly setup stock units. I wonder what will happen to all those Woot returns. I suspect the next bunch of "Big Orphaned Cetacea" winners will be getting these tablets.

I do like the unit now that everything is set up and running but the security thing is really bugging me. Knowing what I know now I'd probably gone ahead and spent another $225 for the basic iPad2.

clarinetbob wrote:When instructions say to "reboot"...what does that mean? Power-down/power-up? Hold the power button down until it shuts down and then restarts? Or do the power button/volume thing? I'm trying to do the market fix so I can see Firefox as an option, but I still don't see it. Thanks anyone!

See my earlier post. I posted about 8:52 AM. I believe it is on page 62

One (hopefully) final question for Roebeet, what is the largest capacity MicroSDHD card I can use with the machine? I've read both 16 and 32 gigs.

Also does the machine recognize both class 4 and 6 cards?

roebeet wrote:Hold the power button button for 3-5 seconds, then choose "shutdown". Then power up as needed.

Hey roebeet, running the stock OTA what should the 3rd softkey down do, on my droidx it is settings, but doesn't do anything on my G-tab I need to know if this is malfunction or by design.

I received my tablet yesterday, I left work early because my wife told me it had arrived. A grown man should not be so excited, seriously Christmas morning paled in comparison.

I have been reading through this thread looking at others impressions, mostly for the ROMs.

I ran through the upgrade of Tap N Tap, I wasn't that impressed. My biggest issue was that the quality of the image was poor. The edges of the icons seemed almost pixelated. I installed clockworkmod next and ran a backup of the stock ROM. I installed Tap N Tap Lite next and had the same impression as the stock ROM. I then installed VEGAN next. Very happy, the image quality is fantastic, it's also quite similar to Cyanogen which is what I run on my phone. It took a little reading as to what order to install Vegan to work. The sticky on XDA was a little confusing. Basically install gtab.VEGAn.1.00.beta5.1.user.final.zip first, and then gtab.VEGAn.1.00.beta5.11.suppl.zip. I used clockworkmod to do all the installs.

One other side note, ROM Manager the application that I use to manage ROM's on my phone does not work with this tablet. It lists a couple of different phone versions and not the gTab. It'd be great if support for the gTab can be worked into ROM Manager, it makes upgrading and moving from one ROM to another extremely easy.

Big thanks to the people at XDA, you took a mediocre tablet and made it A W E S O M E!!!!

joecooool wrote:One (hopefully) final question for Roebeet, what is the largest capacity MicroSDHD card I can use with the machine? I've read both 16 and 32 gigs.

Also does the machine recognize both class 4 and 6 cards?

I can confirm 32GB (class 4), as I own one. I read somewhere that up to 64GB is supported, but I can't confirm that one.

In my case, it's a Sandisk OEM 32GB class 4 from Amazon.

supernaturlbeing wrote:Hey roebeet, running the stock OTA what should the 3rd softkey down do, on my droidx it is settings, but doesn't do anything on my G-tab I need to know if this is malfunction or by design.

That's "settings" and yes it should work. I believe you are not the first person to mention this, so I would suggest at least a user data wipe to see if it fixes it. Keep in mind that will also wipe the user apps, like Kindle and Adobe Flesh (no, I didnt mistype - Woot is having fun with me).

roebeet wrote:That's "settings" and yes it should work. I believe you are not the first person to mention this, so I would suggest at least a user data wipe to see if it fixes it. Keep in mind that will also wipe the user apps, like Kindle and Flesh.

Hum ok, I did a factory reset after I installed the OTA update, so how should I do what you are suggesting?

joecooool wrote:2) There is no password protection for the machine. This is an amazing piece of information that everyone needs to be aware of. I loaded up my email account information and some other personal data into the machine and then went looking for how to lock the unit. You can't. Be aware of this. Make sure if you do use the unit for any forums, email accounts, banking, shopping, etc, that you do not keep your passwords on the unit. If you lose it or it gets stolen, everything on the unit will be there for who ever finds it. Having been a victim of identity theft in the past, this scares the heck out of me and I may not have bought the unit had I known this feature does not exist.

Roebeet, is this true with TNT Lite? With Vegan all of the standard lock options are there. Setting -> Location & Security.

I now a lot of people have expressed concern about getting refurb/returned units. What seems to be the consensus?

Mine was shrink wrapped, and the cords were wrapped up neatly. There was no screen cover on the unit, but it was neatly in that bag thing...

It booted up right to the home screen, and I did not really pay attention to any settings and/or history that may have been on it. I did the OTA and then I got the setup screen....since then I have loaded VEGAn

As far as cosmetics, mine looks fine. No scratches or anything.

roebeet wrote:I can confirm 32GB (class 4), as I own one. I read somewhere that up to 64GB is supported, but I can't confirm that one.

In my case, it's a Sandisk OEM 32GB class 4 from Amazon.

The manual says up to 64GB and recommends "at least 32GB for best user experience" I didnt read anything about what class is supported.

dlevasseur wrote:Roebeet, is this true with TNT Lite? With Vegan all of the standard lock options are there. Setting -> Location & Security.

This is true on ALL the mods.

This is a pet peeve of mine that I've written here and on XDA. Imo, there is zero security on these tablets. It's even worse with mods because we have them rooted with USB debugging on, by default.

These are not laptops. There is no way tmk to really lock them down. Lockscreens are nice, but anyone with a little knowledge can easily bypass them and get direct access to your data. Think Windows 98 security, it was a joke.

I use my tablet for two things -- development (obviously) and content consumption. I don't do online banking, I don't shop in Amazon etc. Any passwords I store (like Google or Pandora) I can easily change if my tablet gets stolen. I also use a tool called "keepass" for keeping my passwords secure. I do this on my laptop, as well.

Just keep in mind what the device is designed for, and be wary of its security shortcomings (especially if you root it). Imo, don't put anything on there that you can't change easily (passwords) or could aid in identify theft (your address, SSN, etc).

My device usually has lots of music that no one would like anyway, comic book scans and some "Red Dwarf" videos. And my Angry Birds scores. They wouldn't get much from my tablet.

roebeet wrote:That's "settings" and yes it should work. I believe you are not the first person to mention this, so I would suggest at least a user data wipe to see if it fixes it. Keep in mind that will also wipe the user apps, like Kindle and Adobe Flesh (no, I didnt mistype - Woot is having fun with me).

Ok so the "setting" softkey only works when I have pressed the "search" softkey and am on that screen, then it brings up search settings, I cannot get it to work on any other app,screen, or anywhere.

Thoughts Roebeet?

FYI, the GTablet is available at the Sears Outlet store for $279.93 (reg $399), and available for store pickup. These may be "used or returned"? However, if you go to the Store, you might be able to snatch a new one. Anyway, the $279 bargain is still available for those who want to partake

Here's the website link to Sears:
http://www.searsoutlet.com/10-1-Android-WiFi-G-Tablet/d/product_details.jsp?stxt=viewsonic&md=srh_md&pn=1&ps=10&pid=70612&mode=buyUsedOnly

Obviously, the link says "buyusedonly", so proceed with caution.

Added VEGAn-TAB on this baby and it ROCKS! I am so happy, I am doing the safety dance in my office at work. Market works, Flesh SO I CAN VIEW MY WEBSITE, faster than the stock, and I just showed 2 iPad users and they left in shame!

Now, one hurdle left....

NETFLIX

Just a FYI, got mine on Wednesday and the tablet appears to be a brand new.

Again, just a reminder that TNT Lite is just one mod - there are many more and VEGAn is probably the most popular one of them all. If you are going to mod your device, I would recommend that you try them all and see what you like best.

TNT Lite has always been a "mostly stock" ROM that doesn't veer too far from what Viewsonic had created. But VEGan completely changes the interface, as do most of the other mods. You have a lot of options.

At one point, I was bouncing between TNT Lite and VEGAn on a weekly basis. VEGAn is a very solid ROM.

I searched several pages but I couldn't find a post regarding what about to ask. I saw that the device may come with up to 2 screen protectors. Did anyone receive a device that came with them? If so, how do you take them off? On my device, there are small dots in a grid on my screen, about 2 pixels wide and a centimeter apart. They create an annoying glare when light hits the screen. Thanks in advanced!

YAY!!!

Apr 1, 2011 7:58 AM
On FedEx vehicle for delivery
PLACENTIA, CA

(no April fools...)

roebeet wrote:Again, just a reminder that TNT Lite is just one mod - there are many more and VEGAn is probably the most popular one of them all. If you are going to mod your device, I would recommend that you try them all and see what you like best.

TNT Lite has always been a "mostly stock" ROM that doesn't veer too far from what Viewsonic had created. But VEGan completely changes the interface, as do most of the other mods. You have a lot of options.

At one point, I was bouncing between TNT Lite and VEGAn on a weekly basis. VEGAn is a very solid ROM.

I recieved my tab yesterday and OTA updated to 3588. Then I immediatly installed TNT lite 4.4.0. I want to try VEGAn and see what I like better. What do I have to do to get to the point I can install VEGAn, I didn't do any kind of backup. Do I just follow the NVFlash instructions and then the VEGAn instructions?

maximumvelocity wrote:I searched several pages but I couldn't find a post regarding what about to ask. I saw that the device may come with up to 2 screen protectors. Did anyone receive a device that came with them? If so, how do you take them off? On my device, there are small dots in a grid on my screen, about 2 pixels wide and a centimeter apart. They create an annoying glare when light hits the screen. Thanks in advanced!

I did some research on this issue right after purchasing mine. It seems that the units with 2 screen protector were a very early production model sold only at Sears. After November 2010, it seems that every model has shipped without screen protectors and comes in the box only contained in the slip cover with the "naked" screen. You might still get one from Sears that has the 2 screen protectors, but that's the only place they ever showed up, as far as I can tell by my research. Hope this helps.

BTW, I ordered the JunLi screen protector from electronicscrap.com. I haven't put it on yet, but it has had good comments from those who are using it. Steve, at electronicscrap.com is great to work with and is a Gtab owner and user. I also bought my M1 case from him and I love it. Fits like a glove and is very functional.

http://electroniccrap.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=9

maximumvelocity wrote:I searched several pages but I couldn't find a post regarding what about to ask. I saw that the device may come with up to 2 screen protectors. Did anyone receive a device that came with them? If so, how do you take them off? On my device, there are small dots in a grid on my screen, about 2 pixels wide and a centimeter apart. They create an annoying glare when light hits the screen. Thanks in advanced!

Regarding the small dots, I have seen some posts around different forums where some people have Gtabs that have a spec of dust or something similar to what you have described embedded under the glass, between the LCD and the glass cover. Not sure there is much you can do about this. The link below is a pretty good video just posted by this guy who purchased his Gtab from Woot last week, like most of us, and the guy says at the end that he also has this white spec under the glass on his unit. Video is worth wathing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM_85oIvBtc

Hello everyone,

I forgot to upgrade the stock ROM to 3588 from 3399 via OTA, and then flashed it with VEGAn-TAB 5.1.

Can someone please tell me what to do to upgrade the current stock ROM to 3588?


Thanks,

pairlink wrote:I recieved my tab yesterday and OTA updated to 3588. Then I immediatly installed TNT lite 4.4.0. I want to try VEGAn and see what I like better. What do I have to do to get to the point I can install VEGAn, I didn't do any kind of backup. Do I just follow the NVFlash instructions and then the VEGAn instructions?

Clockworkmod will work on all the 1.1-based ROMs, you can backup what you have and then flip back and forth between ROMs by flashing them.

I don't recommend cwm for TNT Lite, only because it doesn't update the bootloader. But right now, that's not a big problem. It could be a problem later on, so just keep that in the back of your mind.

roebeet wrote:Clockworkmod will work on all the 1.1-based ROMs, you can backup what you have and then flip back and forth between ROMs by flashing them.

I don't recommend cwm for TNT Lite, only because it doesn't update the bootloader. But right now, that's not a big problem. It could be a problem later on, so just keep that in the back of your mind.

So from TNT Lite 4.4.0 I can just Flesh to VEGAn CWM, correct?

Anybody else experience a continuous humming noise from the power adapter?

gomrwoot wrote:Hello everyone,

I forgot to upgrade the stock ROM to 3588 from 3399 via OTA, and then flashed it with VEGAn-TAB 5.1.

Can someone please tell me what to do to upgrade the current stock ROM to 3588?


Thanks,

If you put Vegan on there, you don't have to do anything. The stock rom no longer exists...