EMATICS EGQ307 8gb Quad Core Tablet FAQ / TIPS AND TRICKS
by CHOPPERGIRL ( choppergirl@air-war.org )Document last updated: 2014 - 10 - 25 check back for updates as I continue to write & finish this FAQ
Welcome every one who has bought this tablet on close out sale for $39.99, or $69.99, at Walmart, Ebay, or elsewhere.
I picked mine up for $39.99 right before the sale ended. I sat on the fence a long time researching this tablet and watching YouTube videos on it before I bought it. I wanted the Yellow one but they jacked the price back up on that one, so I was stuck buying the black one.
I already have a Nexus 7 2013, so I bought this as a curious toy and just a new gadget to play with. Even though its specs are significantly lower than the Nexus 7, and it has quite a few major flaws, I find I actually like using it. Its no Shelby Cobra like the Nexus 7 2013, but its more like a Volkswagen Bus. It grows on you. I am fascinated by it, simply for the price I obtained it at...less than $50. The one laptop per child dream... existing, and available for purchase at your local Walmart (albeit - site to store).
I am working on this FAQ for this tablet. If you have anything to contribute about using this tablet in real life or otherwise, email me at choppergirl@air-war.org and put "Ematics Tablet" in your subject line. If for nobody else, this page is a place for me to record everything I have done to mod config the tablet, in case I should ever have to reset it to a factory fresh image and have to redo everything I've done before to get it back to an optimal configuration.
The main problem you will run into with this tablet is you will quickly run out of installation space when installing apps you download from the Google Play store. This is because, by default, android downloads and installs apps to the first main storage drive.... which on this unit, is a 1gb drive space with only 230k space left free (fresh from the factory). So you QUICKLY run out of storage space.
And yet, there is 3.9gb of empty storage space that it "seems" like you can not touch or install to. You can. The main purpose of this document is going to be to tell you how to easily move all your apps out of that 230k space, onto the 3.9gb of space, using an app like "App 2 SD", and to configure the tablet (not so easy) to automatically download and install new apps to this 3.9gb space (or your external SD card) instead of onto the 1gb maxed out system partition.
This document is a work in progress and many parts may be incomplete, as I have not finished writing them. So my instructions are not entirely complete or written for a complete noobie to follow them. So bear with me. I'll flush them out over time.
Screen snapshots of desktop of my unit are below, so you can see some of the more useful apps I have installed, and games installed just to test the GPU. Mostly I use my tablets as news aggregate readers and to surf the web, as I don't play games much anymore (having been a game developer).
As you can see, I've got probably 3gb+ of installed games and apps on the tablet, including Real Racing and League of Legends (two honking huge games). All apps possible have been moved to the internal simulated SDcard space:
Desktop A
Desktop B
Desktop C
Desktop D - running "Hangar" and "Usemon" traybar extensions
Specs
Clear cache page 1
Clear cache page 2
MEET YOUR TABLET
THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE - TABLET SMELLS LIKE DIRT
The tablet is not actually dirty, this is chemical out gassing from the rubber on the backing of the tablet and should decrease over time if left out in the open. When you are not using it, place your tablet face down on something soft (pillow, wash cloth, towel) so as to not scratch the screen, but to expose the maximum area of the rubber backing to the air.
After several days most of the smell as gone away, but it may take some weeks exposed to the air for the smell to gas off and be completely gone. If you have chemically sensitive skin you may want to be skip this tablet or be careful with it, as there is no telling what chemicals were used to manufacture this rubber backing.
THE SECOND THING YOU NOTICE - SCRATCHY SANDPAPER FEEL SCREEN
This is the screen protector that came from the screen factory; peel it off starting from a corner, to have a nice smooth glass screen.
THE THIRD THING YOU NOTICE - SCREEN CAUSES EYE FATIGUE / BRIGHTNESS
I've found turning off auto-brightness, and turning down the screen brightness all the way to the lowest setting, helps significantly with eye fatigue and makes the screen not that bad to look at. It doesn't get rid of the wield stereoscopic parallelax but it does tone down the "sparkliness" of it somewhat.
The edges on the glass screen seem sharp to touch. Upon examining the tablet closer, I found it was not the glass edges that bit into your finger, but a sharp piece of plastic trim that went around the edges. I tried filing this edge from a right square angle down to have a 45 degree angle on it with a fingernail emory board, to be more smoother, but the jury is still out how much this helped. At any rate, after the filing it isn't visible and didn't touch the glass any.
INFLATED SPECS
The specs listed for the tablet on the box are inflated. The quad core runs at 1008mghz, and the on board storage is two banks of 1gb and 4gb (5gb total, not 8gb). You will see the CUP listed as 1.5ghz, or 1.2ghz (1200mghz), on the box and in some spec programs, but when I run other spec programs I find that the cores are running at 1.08ghz (1080) mghz and no other stepping.
While not a screamer, it is an A31 quad core with a decent GPU that can play some very intensive 3D games without lag. I find my Nexus 7 Snapdragon at 1.4, however, to be *much* snappier, and it throttles and shutsdown cores when not in use, unlike the A31.
USB CABLE TOO SHORT
You can buy a longer microUSB to USB cable in various colors from the Dollar Store for $1.
MEET THE MAIN ACHILLES HEAL OF THIS TABLET AND HOW TO
MITIGATE IT
OUT OF SPACE TO INSTALL APPLICATIONS
By default, Android installs applications to the \ (root) folder.
Unfortunatly.... there is only about 230k left (stock) on this 1gb drive partition (less on mine, which hovers around 160k and decreases as I use apps that fill \data with their temp cache files).
There is a second 4gb drive partition on the device with 3.9gb free area from the factory, that is set to mimic an sdcard folder. It is called "sdcard" and mounted at /mnt/sdcard.
Any actual SD card you installed, is called "extsd" and is mounted at /mnt/extsd.
So why didn't the company make the 4gb drive the / root drive, and the 1gb drive the mimiced sdcard drive, instead of the other way around? Everything would of been totally groovy then. I have no idea, it would of been a simple change that would of fixed the main glaring problem with this tablet, but they did, and its going to be the one obstacle with this tablet you are going to have to work around.
On the Nexus 7, as a comparison, the 16gb is one continous / drive, and you can install apps to your hearts content without fuss or thinking about anything at all, and never be the wiser. That's probably why I have a fondness for the Ematics, because I have to get down and dirty into the linux command prompt and waste hours doing it to fix things. While not fun and kind of annoying, you actually learn more that way, which I would of never been driven to do on the much better designed Nexus.
INTERNAL FLASH DRIVE OVERVIEW
I suspect on this device that it does not have 8gb of continguous storage
as advertised, but two seperate internal flash drives (banks) of 1gb and
4gb. The manufacturer just said to themselves... "Eh, well just round up
5gb to 8gb so we don't confuse the consumer."
You have four total potential drive devices on this tablet, which you can
find in the local \mnt folder if you install ES File Explorer (free from
the Google Play app store):
\ which is 1gb root internal flash drive for the android system
files with about 240mb free
\sdcard. which is is 4gb internal flash drive with about 3.9 GB free
\extsd. Which is any actual external microSD card you plug into the
device in its slot
\usbhost1. Which is any USB flash drive you connect with a male microUSB
to female normal USB adapter (yes you can do this, the adapter cables are
99 cents on eBay)
There are two ways to move apps from the 1gb partition to the other partitions...
natively with an android control panel, or using an app store app such as "App 2 SD":
App 2 SD: Download from searching Google Play for "App 2 SD" -- this is the simplest
way to move it.
Natively: To move your apps from the default install location on the 1gb partition
to the 4gb partition, go to Settings Control Panel; Storage; Apps... Then
right flick in Apps from "All" to "On SD card"... There will be check
marks by any app installed on the so designated SD partions. Click those
that are not, which will take you into the specifics for that t app, and
click the button " Move to SD card". Do this for all your apps. You not
need to root your device to do this under this version of Android, its
built into the native control panel.
Note that when you do this, if you don't have an external SD card
installed, the android stsytem will move it into \sdcard internal drive.
If you do have an external SD card in the device and you do this move, it
could be move to either the \sdcard internal drive OR the externalsd card
capriciously. Android just picks one destination or the other.
INSTALL "APP2SD"
Run this app and move everything you can to SD Card.
A nice feature of App2SD is when you install a new little app to internal storage, it will detect it and ask you if you want to move it.
ROOT TABLET
This method in the link below works, I have done it on my tablet and is simple to do. You will need an SD card... I used an old 512k one from an old phone... as you only need about 225K on it to store the OTA zip file:
From: http://www.freaktab.com/showthread.php?8958-Quick-and-Easy-Root-for-ematic-EGQ307-series
Quick and Easy Root for the ematic EGQ307 series Allwinner QuadCore-A31 Bean4.2 Tablet
This file will install the su binary and set correct permissions only.
1. Right click and download (save as...) RootFromOTA.zip to external sdcard
2. Insert sdcard into tablet, and on your tablet goto Settings -> Backup & reset and select Recovery Mode
3. Select "apply update from external storage" and select RootFromOTA.zip
4. Reboot
5. Install SuperSU from play store or other super user permissions android app
6. Enjoy Root
INSTALL "SYSTEM CLEANUP"
Install "System Cleanup" from the Apps store and use it, to move even more apps to SD (Android system apps)
This "System Cleanup" is a little more dangerous to use than "App 2 SD" as you can use it to move some android prebundled apps to SD.. stuff such as Youtube, KingOffice, PogoPlayer, etc.
Even more aggressive and without checks is an app called "AppstoROM". I found AppstoROM didn't work for me though.
CREATE SYMBOLIC LINK TO /data/local (Google Play Store Download Location)
You will need to install a "Terminal Emulator" Program from the Google Play Store, and should sort of be familiar with linux to do this. Basically, you want to "su" to root power, then create a directory on your SDcard, and make a symbolic link to it on the root drive so that Google Play will download into that symbolic root drive, but its actually pointed and contents are stored on a folder on your SDcard where you have oodles of free space. This will get rid of the warning messages "You can not download this app because you don't have enough free space".
$ su
# mkdir /mnt/sdcard/data/local
# cp -r /data/local/* /mnt/sdcard/data/local
# rm -rf /data/local
# ln -s /mnt/sdcard/data/local /data/local
MAKE SYMBOLIC LINK TO CACHE DIRECTORY WHEREVER THAT IS
You would think this would be \cache but I'm not sure, as I don't see any cache files being stored in there.
So far, I'm just manually clearing my cache on the \ internal drive periodicall until I can figure out where this folder actually is to make a symbolic link to it.
Directory location of all the expanding application and application cache cruft: \data
I'm thinking the whole /data folder needs to be somehow moved to /mnt/sdcard/data and a symlink made to the new location... unfortunatly, /data is full of symlinks of its own which defy copying and moving...
CHANGE DEFAULT INSTALL LOCATIONS TO SD CARDS
I find after doing these mods, to change the default install location, android will still install small apps on the internal drive, so it is dubious how clear this mod, considering how involved it is, as it doesn't seem to work.
http://www.howtogeek.com/114667/how-to-install-android-apps-to-the-sd-card-by-default-move-almost-any-app-to-the-sd-card/
Note: in these directions, the incorrect command is given missing hyphens..."adb shell pm setInstallLocation 2"
the correct command should be: "adb shell pm set-install-location 2"
Also, if Windows does not recognize your android device and install the drivers automatically, you will need this ADB Universal driver installer:
http://adbdriver.com/downloads/
More information: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/install-location.html
As I said, I did this mod to change the default install location, but I think Android ignores it.
On the plus side, irrelevant of this, if the apps is too big to fit on your internal card, Android will install it to sdcard or extsd instead. Small apps though, it may put randomly on any drive... in which case, if its your / partion, App2SD should catch it and alert you and ask you if you want to move it.
CHANGE DEFAULT DOWNLOAD LOCATIONS TO SD CARS
Again, I haven't had success with this, as this doc seems to related to some odd file browser used on a phone.
http://www.howtogeek.com/114667/how-to-install-android-apps-to-the-sd-card-by-default-move-almost-any-app-to-the-sd-card/
OTHER TOPICS OF NOTABLE INTEREST
OVERCLOCKING THE CPU
The 4 cores of the CPU run at 1.2, though the box indicates 1.5ghz. I suspect they may even be running lower thant this, at 1.0 ghz. This is done to lower battery drain and heat, but there is probably a way to upclock this tablet to 1.5ghz. I have tried to enable throttling and raising the max CPU speed with various androids apps but with no success yet.
CPU Features Not Implemented
From what I can tell, the A31 CPU has GPS and compass and other sensors on die, as well as radio features, built into it, but these were not made use of or implemented in the hardware. I may be wrong about this as I have not investigated it in detail. Unfortunately, the only sensors enabled on this unit are related to tilt angle, useful for gaming and that's about it.
POOR BATTERY LIFE
When the unit arrives it has a fully dead battery. You will have to plug it in before it will boot. The unit will charge while you are playing with it however.
The CPU does not seem to throttle or shut off cores not in use. When I check on my tablet, all cores are running at full speed always. However, this chip should be able to throttle down to 120mghz and up to 1200 mghz (1.2 ghz).
A piece of paper that ships with the tablet says you should charge and discharge fully the tablet a few times, before you will get the maximum battery life.
I always keep my tablet plugged in, so this is a not much of an issue for me.
Removing Screen Snapshot button from Toolbar
If anyone has a clue or knows how to do this, or rearrange the icons, or reskin the icons, let me know. They are in a different order than on my Nexus (which is more logical), which is irksome, and I find myself pressing the screen snapbutton by accident instead of the open apps list icon... and then have to delete the useless screen snapshot. At any rate, the arrangement of the icons is daft... a more logical order would be: Volume Up, Volume Down, Screen Snapshot, App list, Home, Back Button