A Cheap Android Tablet

OUZRS M15 Tablet

I have a piece of hardware that requires an Android device, and the cheapest one I could find new was the OUZRS Android Tablet 10 Inch, Android 12 Tablet with 8GB RAM 64GB ROM(1TB Expand), Dual Camera, WiFi Tablet, Bluetooth, GMS Certified, Computer Tablets-M15(Pink), $149 but with a 50% off coupon that brought it down to $75. It’s ... fine, I guess. The specs seem to be a lie, at least according to the devcheck tool (see the screenshots below).

• Manufacturer. Not the widely respected OUZRS who took such great pains to add their “brand” to the unnecessary and generic startup video, but Incar; this tablet is an Incar M15, using an rk30sdk board (a relatively  ubiquitous OEM/reference logic board).
  
• CPU. It uses the Rockchip RK3326, which, according to the manufacturer, features a “Quad-core Cortex-A35 up to 1.5GHz.” The devcheck utility jives with this, reporting each of the four cores will run somewhere between 408 MHz and 1512 MHz. (Amazon listing: “octa-core 64-bit Cortex-A35 main frequency 2.0Ghz.” This is not a 2GHz machine.)
• RAM. The system reports 4GB, devcheck reports 2GB of RAM and ~1.5GB of "ZRAM" (which is a partition of the system’s RAM used for swap space, with compressed contents). The Amazon listing states “8GB(4+4GB virtual memory)” (which doesn’t quite line up with the title of the listing, which just says “8GB RAM”). In any event, this device seems to have just 2GB or 4GB of actual, physical, RAM.
  
• Storage. It does have 64GB of storage onboard.
• Battery. The Amazon listing says it has a “6850mAh battery” while according to devcheck, the system reports a 6000mAh battery. There’s some variance between cells, but usually not a 12.4% discrepancy.
• Android Version. The listing says Android 12, but devcheck reports Android 11 (and API version 30). The installed kernel is 4.19.193, which was used by both Android 12 and 11. In Settings, the system reports it’s “Updated to Android 11,” that my “device’s software is currently up to date,” and tthat software is “M15_20230324_20230324-1636.” But “Android 12” does pop up in at least one place, and running getprop ro.build.version.release in Terminal Emulator reports: “12.” Either way, Android 12 is from 2021 (Android 11 was originally released in 2020), so even if it is 12, it’s getting pretty long in the tooth..
  
• Screen. This is a 10" tablet, and it’s fairly low resolution - 1280x800, the same as you’ll find on a Fire 8" tablet, and here it’s only good for 150 ppi. Worse, unlike Apple’s ~10" offerings (like the original iPad, which used 768x1024 in portrait mode (3:4, or, .75), very close to the dimension of standard pages (e.g., 8.5x11" is .77), this Android uses a 16:10 ratio display, in portrait mode, .63. This makes it awkward to read PDFs downloaded from Lexis or Westlaw, or most treatises and many textbooks and technical books. Either the page is smaller than it needs to be to fit horizontally (with useless empty space top and bottom), or you're panning around the page trying to read everything. Given the placement of the front camera on this device (along the long edge), this is probably intended to be used mostly in landscape mode, to consume media etc. but not necessarily for reading. Pity, that’s one of my main uses cases for tablets.
• Power. Although it has a USB-C port, when I hooked it up to a high quality USB-C 100W cable connected to a high quality USB-C PD 30W wall wort, it did nothing. Never charged. Hooked up to an ancient Anker PowerPort 5 (2124), which puts out a maximum of 5V @ 2.4A (12W) through USB-A ports, it charged just fine. I’ll play around with my test equipment and see if it’s negotiating anything at all. I suspect it’s not.
  
• Pros. It was cheap. It came with a screen protector already installed, and in a wrap-around thin transparent plastic case with a screen cover that folds back behind the unit like the cover of a paperback book, or can be folded to a somewhat unstable and awkward, but hey it was “free,” kickstand to hold the screen up in landscape mode. There are Android versions of cross-platform tools I use regularly, like Termius and RVNC Viewer, so it’s not like I can’t use it as a thin client if nothing else.
  
• Cons. Aside from the lies, the outdated software, the awkward aspect ratio, etc.? It works as a tablet. It’s not as responsive as I’d expect a brand new device to be, and sometimes it trips over its own feet. But for $75 for my specialized use case (it worked just fine with the hardware, BTW, which requires an OTG USB connection), it’s fine, and might be worth keeping around just to have an Android device to test with / remind me why I almost exclusively stick with the Apple ecosystem.

But that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong.