Teclast P98 3G Octa: initial impressions

[grenness]

So I received my P98 3G with an Octa Core MTK8392 a few days ago.
(ordered from aliexpress.com)

For the price ($240) I'm more than happy.
It's good looking (looks like an iPad from the front, the champagne back shows this is something else...), nice Retina screen, has a built in cellular radio so that I can connect to my 3G provider here in Norway.

But as always there are a few things I've found that I don't like...
Most of them will probably be fixed as soon as I'm able to root the P98, but so far I haven't found neither a verified rooting procedure or any ROMs although ROMs for other MTK8392's might work (but not so sure I want to be the first to try...)

First and foremost, the OS has the storage partitioned into a relatively small System partition of just 890MB where I have already hit the limit. The 'internal storage', or sdcard0, is 11.43GB total.
I have installed a 32GB micro SD, but so far I haven't been able to use it - at least not for 'native' app data. I can of course manually copy movies, TV series and stuff to have on the micro SD, but for instance my music streaming app, called Wimp (a Spotify alternative), for some reason doesn't allow me to store offline music on the micro SD (as it does for instance on my Sony Z1 Compact phone).

Speaking of my Z1c phone, it has just one large 'in device' partition of 11.8GB plus an external micro SD card, so there's hardly any limits on how many apps I want to install.

I have on the P98 moved all the apps that are possible to move to the 'internal storage', but still I've reached the storage limit on the System partition so I need to start uninstalling apps in order to add new ones.

It also comes with surprisingly much bloatware, and they are all in Chinese so I have no idea what they are. One I do recognize is Baidu, which takes over all my searches unless I open the browser, go to www.google.com and perform a search there. If I search via the Google search bar on my desktop or by entering a search string in the browser address field, Baidu takes over.
I also get a lot of notifications in Chinese from different apps (I assume).

What else...
A slight movement can be felt on the lower left frame when pressing, probably too little glue there when they assembled it. No big deal, hardly noticable.

No automatic brightness adjustment was a bit disappointing, but again no biggie.

AnTuTu 5 gives me 30.122, I think it dropped just a tad after I switched from Dalvik to ART (yes, all Developer options are available).

If you have any comments or questions please let me know!

EDIT: two more things: Chrome (and Chrome Beta) crashes. That I was aware of before I bought this, but still hoping to see Google fix this. But a bit of a bigger problem, my Google/Gmail contacts are nowhere to be seen... I've checked that Contacts are supposed to be synced, but nothing (noone) appears. Will try to delete and reenable my Google account to see if that helps.


Regards,

Christopher
Oslo, Norway

PS. First post here, please advice if I'm posting not according to rules or forum etiquette!

[chris-mm]

possible rooting tool

Hi Christopher,

I'm pretty shure the relatively new root-genius-mobile.apk will do the trick!

It is confirmed on the russian 4pda forum, that it roots the Cube talk 9x without problems.
So it should work on the mt8392 teclast device too.
You dont need a PC connection. It's a simple .apk, direct executable on your device.

You can download it from the shuame hompage under xxx.shuame.com/m/root.html
(Don't know if direct links are allowed, so I wrote xxx instead of www)

Just click the green android button to download.

It's in chinese, but you can find pictured help with google.
Maybe you will give it a try? If yes, please post your result.

Regards,
Chris

[grenness]

Chris,

I went ahead and tried it - but unfortunately it didn't work (luckily it didn't brick my tablet either...)

I then tried both the chinese and english version of the genius rooter windows application where you connect the tablet to the PC and run the win app, the chinese version rebooted the tablet maybe 1-2 times then gave me a large sad face which said it all... The english version went on for maybe 20 minutes, 5-6 reboots, my hopes went up, but sadly it too gave up and avtually said something like "you got a tough phone to root - I give up!"

Thanks for the tips anyhow!

Regards,
Christopher

[chris-mm]

Sorry to hear that...

Chris

[grenness]

There's also something fishy with the sound processing...
When listening to music or watching a movie or an episode of a TV series, the sound of the voice(s) tend to fade down into the background so I can almost only hear the music (in a song) or the background music or ambient (in a movie/TV series episode).

Man, I really need to root and get hold of some custom ROM! ;-)

[grenness]

Original firmware download

Teclast Customer Support reply to emails sent to [email protected]
From them, within a few hours I received a link to the download page for the original firmware/ROM for the P98 3G Octa:

http://dl.vmall.com/c008v3k5uq#

(to be sure, first go to http://www.teclast.com/tools/pad/putcode.html then enter the ID printed on the back of the tablet, on mine it's 'A3HY')

Now I'm just waiting for the download to start - hopefully all 440MB can be downloaded...

[grenness]

I've got ROOT! :-)

I followed @rriley 's instructions in this post, where he linked to the file MTK_root_update.zip that I downloaded, then shut off the tablet and turned it back on while holding both Volume Up and Power.
This enters stock Recovery, where I could install the update zip. Reboot, and voila! :-)
I've since rebooted several times, tested with Root Explorer, SuperSU and other tools and yes, I've got Root on the Teclast P98 3G Octa core!

[rrileypm]

[900supersport]

I've downloaded the firmware you found and took a quick look and put together some edited EBR files and a CWM recovery created using MTK Droid tools. You should be able to flash just these files, make certain you backup first in case anything goes wrong.



http://www.freak-tab.de/900supersport/mtk/P98_3G.zip

[grenness]

I've downloaded the firmware you found and took a quick look and put together some edited EBR files and a CWM recovery created using MTK Droid tools. You should be able to flash just these files, make certain you backup first in case anything goes wrong.

Thanks, rriley put together a ROM a few days ago that works fine.
As it seems pretty stable he'll probably post it in this thread or create a new thread.
Most important thing missing, which was missing in the stock ROM as well, is Google Contacts- not the app to list and find contacts but the 'engine' that syncs with my gmail account.
He's been notified so hopefully it's possible to find the missing file(s) from another ROM and include them without too much work.

Christopher

[900supersport]

What version of android is it?

[rrileypm]

It's a KK ROM. I'm going to look today and see what's missing from the stock ROM and add what I have.

I'm not sure what to do about the external SD problem. I made the usual changes in the test ROM, but it still won't write to external SD....so no Titanium Backups.

[900supersport]

The cube is 4.4.2 let me know if you want any files from it.

[grenness]

Still some issues

The issues we still have, are...

* Google Contacts sync is completely missing (Teclast apologizes and says due to the Chinese government's blocking of all Google services they are unable to test Google functionality...)

* Writing to external SD works for some applications (DoggCatcher) not for others (Wimp - I will ask them to look into this)


I also wrongly assumed there was a hardware or software bug in the audio processing circuit, but Teclast told me they stick to the 'old' OMTP audio jack standard which still is considered the industry standard in China, instead of the newer CTIA standard made popular with iPhone.
Maybe common knowledge for some, but noteworthy nevertheless.
But I might add that my Xiaomi MI2 phone never had any problems with my CTIA headsets.

[gpotya]

Hi there.


@rrileypm and @Grennes


I also have a Teclast P98 MTK8392 3G Octa Core, and would be interested in knowing whether there has been progress on the custom rom was being developed. I would also like to know if released in Spanish.
I am interested in it mainly for the subject of Chinese apps (showing up) and all problems you may have (such as not to write to the SD).


Thanks in advance


a greeting