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Episode: 1377
Title: HPR1377: Zareason ZaTab 2 Android Tablet
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1377/hpr1377.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 00:27:14
---
Hello, this is Frank Bell, and today I want to talk about my new Zahrizan Zahtab ZT2 tablet.
I recently purchased one of these.
I've never had a burning desire to have a tablet, just to have one.
I see too many folks come into a location, they grab their tablet, they attach a keyboard
to it and voila, instant netbook.
But I, from time to time, find myself in situations where I would like to have connectivity
and wireless is available, but the geography is not favorable.
That's a fancy way of saying they're chairs, but no tables.
I'm considering getting my next laptop from Zahrizan, and it occurred to me that trying
out their tablet, which is rather reasonably priced, would be a good way of evaluating
their workmanship, since they are rather pricey compared to say Dell and some of the other
mass produced PC vendors.
Zahrizan, as some of you may know, along with System76 are two of the major vendors who
cater to the Linux market.
Unlike System76, which is an Ubuntu shop, Zahrizan allows you within limits to pick the
distro that you want installed on your new machine.
And since I have long ago become fed up with the antics of canonical and the direction
that Ubuntu has been heading in for the last two years, I don't want to spend my money
on an Ubuntu box if I can avoid it.
This tablet arrived about a week ago, I've been playing with it ever since, and so far
I'm quite happy with it.
It seems to be a nice piece of work, and I'm also positively impressed with the workmanship.
A little bit about it to start with the dimensions, and by the way, the information I'm giving
you, I put in a handout, I will be presenting about this device to my lug meeting.
The lug meeting hasn't happened yet, although by the time this post, it should have taken
place, there will be a link to download the handout if you're interested in the show notes,
as well as a link to Zahrizan's presence on the web.
The overall dimensions, the outside dimensions, is 10 and a quarter inches by 6 and 7 eighths,
and approximately 3 eighths of an inch thick.
That's about 26 by 17 and a half by slightly under one centimeter.
The screen itself is about 9 and a half by 5 and a quarter inches, or approximately
24 by 13.3 centimeters.
All the ports are down on the right hand side, if you're holding it with the camera lens
at the top, and some of the ports have a cover on them, others do not.
A little about the text specs, you can get the full rundown at the website, but here
are the highlights.
It's running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, it's got an all-wear 4-core CPU chip, that's a brand
I hadn't heard of before, but it seems to function quite nicely, a touchscreen, certainly.
It's got 8 gigs internal storage, plus a micro SD card slot, and this is nice, 2 gigabytes
of RAM.
All those RAMs make it very responsive.
It's got A02.11 BGN wireless connectivity, and the wireless antenna seems to work quite
nicely.
It's got a camera with both front and back lenses, more about the camera later.
And as a nice sturdy metal back, and as I say, it seems like a very solid machine.
In addition to the micro SD card port, it's got a headphone port, a mini HDMI video out,
and a micro USB port.
micro USB is the type of port that comes on most of the new Android phones, since the phone
manufacturers have finally given in to standardizing.
I have tested this with the USB cable that came with my girlfriend's phone, the one that
came with my phone, and they were made by different manufacturers, as well as obviously
the one that came with the tablet, and all the cables fit.
We're not stuck to using a cable that comes from the manufacturer.
You can use it, apparently, with any modern cell phone USB cable.
In addition to the USB connection, it does have a DCN port.
It comes with a wall wart for convenient charging at a wall outlet.
The default application load seems to be a fairly standard Android load.
There doesn't seem to be anything that has been added by Zah Reason in the way of branding,
unlike the typical cell phone that will come with apps from your cell phone carrier, at least
here in the States.
There's a video player, the calculator, unlike the calculator on my Android phone.
When I start this calculator, it has various mathematical and scientific functions, in addition
to the normal, add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
I would guess simply because there's enough screen real estate to display these options.
It has various Google functions, aren't it, like Google Chrome, Google Play, the Google
Map, the Google Play Store, Google Music, and so on and so forth, and it comes with Chrome.
In addition, it also comes with Firefox.
There's also a number of default widgets, which you may or may not choose to use, such
as a calendar viewer.
I tested that out.
What the calendar viewer does is put a thing on the desktop where you can actually see some
of your calendar appointments and scroll through them.
There's an analog clock, directions and navigations, an email viewer where you have a little picture
of your inbox.
I don't use these things.
I am not a widget kind of guy, but if you like widgets, there are these and altogether
about 20 body fault.
In addition, certain programs you may install may also put in their own widgets.
As for navigation, when you first fire this up, you'll be looking at a blank workspace.
On the upper left, there's a quick link to Google.
There's an icon to start the voice recognition, and the upper right, there are six little
dots arranged in a rectangle, which open up the program menu display.
In the bottom left are various navigation buttons and software volume controls, and in
the bottom right is the notification panel showing the wireless, the little wireless antenna
radiating out, and that's where the pop-ups will appear if you get emails or something
of that sort.
If you tap the menu item and open up the program menu, you'll see an arrangement of icons
for your programs.
At the top of the display, there's the word apps in the left, and right next to it,
the word widgets.
You can navigate to the widget screen by tapping the word widgets, or you can take your
finger, swipe it across the screen to the left, and that will send the program screen off
the side.
It falls off into nothingness, and you're looking at the widget screen.
Swipe right, it brings the program screen back.
Then you can scroll through the various widget screens the same way by swiping to the
left or to the right.
There are four default workspaces.
I looked in the settings.
I could not find an item to increase or decrease the number of default workspaces.
That doesn't mean it's not there, it probably just means I didn't look hard enough to put
an icon or a widget on a workspace.
In the menu panel, press and hold that icon, or press and hold that widget, and it'll
flash.
When it flashes, you can then drag it off and place it on the workspace.
If you have second thoughts, and you want to remove it from the workspace, press and hold
it, and at the top of the screen, the letter X will appear with your finger, drag it to
the X.
Not a trashcan at the bottom, as has been common on the Android phones I've seen, it's an
X at the top, and it's not terribly prominent.
So the first time you might have to look for it a bit.
And you can swipe left or right to change your workspaces.
You touch an icon to start a program.
If you want to close a program, you touch the back button in the bottom left.
It looks like a little arrow looping off to the left.
Android phones I've seen will have these buttons too, either hardware buttons or software
buttons, but the symbols are always the same.
If you want to go to your blank screen, close the program and go home, you tap the home
button, which cleverly looks like a picture of a bungalow from the side.
And there's also a button I haven't seen on my phone, and that's a recently used programs
button.
It looks like two overlapping rectangles.
You press that along the left side, we'll open up a display showing the programs you've
recently used.
If you want to go back to one, say you were looking at your email program, you went off
to do something else.
You want to go back to your email program, just tap it, and it will be restored in the
same state it was in when you left it.
Some other general observations, boot times approximately 45 seconds, shutdown time,
is approximately 5 seconds, as with Android phones to put it to sleep or to wake it up.
You tap the power button very briefly.
If you're waking it up, unless you have said it to have no lock on the screen, it will
wake up to the unlock screen and you'll need to unlock it using the method of your choice.
Password, swipe, pattern, whatever you may have chosen.
The battery life seems to be very good.
When I first got it, the first thing I did was to plug it into charge.
And the battery indicator at that time told me that it was close to fully charged, even
though it had spent a week traveling across country.
So rather than charging it, I immediately started to beat it to death, installing the
programs that I particularly like to use, learning how to navigate the screens, setting
up my email, hopping back and forth one program to the other, very intensely.
And I was able to beat it to death like this for almost 3.5 hours before I got the 15%
battery left, please charge me now message.
So I plugged it in and charged it up.
It took about 4 hours to charge up to a full battery.
And then that evening, shortly before I went to bed when it was fully charged, I turned
it on, I played with it for half an hour or so, then left it on standby.
I didn't touch it again to late the next afternoon and at that point, it still had 44%
of the battery left, even though it had been used for half hour or 45 minutes, I was reading
an ebook and then sitting on standby for that time.
I have not had the patience to just put it on standby and leave it and see how long
it lasts.
I haven't been able to keep my hands off it long enough to do that, but I think this
is quite good.
It certainly exceeds the battery life of any phone I've had.
It has the standard Android keyboard.
Any user of an Android phone will recognize it when you tap on to a text field or a number
field or a URL or an editor application.
What appears is the bottom four rows of the query keyboard without the number row.
And there are a couple of tailored keys such as this as a .com key.
So if you're typing in a URL, you can simply hit the .com key to fill in the .com.
And then there are two keyboard displays for numbers and symbols.
You tap the .123 key on the left and you get to the first number and symbol key.
And then you would type another key to go to the second symbols keyboard.
And then from either of those, there's an ABC key to tap to return to the letter keyboard.
This also has, and I haven't mentioned this before, but this device comes rooted.
It also has built-in screenshot capability.
In the settings, you go to display screenshot setup and you can turn on the screenshot button.
And that appears in the bottom left, just to the left of the two volume buttons.
And with that button enabled, if you are looking at something and want to take a screenshot,
you simply tap on it and the device takes and saves the screenshot.
I have not found a way to set a delay.
So if, for example, you wanted to take a screenshot of the recently used programs panel,
if you tap on the screenshot button, the recently used programs panel goes away.
So I looked around to see how I could do that.
I couldn't find a way to do a delay so that I could say take a screenshot in five seconds
and then start up the recently used programs panel and have it see if it would take it
while it was on the screen.
So I tried a screenshot trial out from the Play Store and was able to get a screenshot
of that recently used panel using it.
Then the trial expired and so did my usage of that program.
The screens seem to have excellent resolution.
I have been quite satisfied with it in my eyes or not the best.
If you rotate the device, there's a smooth and fast rotation.
It doesn't care which end is up.
You can have it rotated in any orientation and it seems to work just fine.
The only way I can tell when I'm using it, which side is supposed to be the top,
is I look for the little tiny camera lens and where the camera lens is, that's the top.
A little bit about the camera.
It defaults to the back lens.
There's a rotation icon to change from the back to the front or from the front to the back.
To test the camera, I went out on my deck for the for the fall colors
and took a picture with it set on the highest and the finest resolution
and the results were not quite what I would hope.
The picture was the details were blurry and I loaded up the picture in the
gimp and the details were also blurry and beyond the ability of the gimp sharpened function
to make them become unnoticeable.
As for the camera, it looks like it's okay if you want to take pictures and email them
to your friends of people having pratfalls or your friendly local car rack or something like that
but it doesn't look like it's something that I would choose to use if I wanted to take a picture
and post it on my website or put it in a document.
Regarding the USB mount, the device must be powered on for you to mount it as a drive.
If you connect it to the USB cable and the USB cable connected to the computer,
it will pop up a message asking if you want to turn on USB storage and warns you that certain
applications may not be available while USB storage is turned on. It mounted very quickly.
I tested both with Slackware Linux where it mounted almost instantaneously and with Windows 7
where Windows 7 had to go through a little drill.
Oh, you hardware is detected. Oh, whatever shall I do? Oh, there's a driver right there in my closet.
It was far easier than when I tried to get my girlfriend's phone working with her Windows
computer which turned into a half an hour or a deal of going out and downloading a driver from
her phone manufacturer. So the USB mount was quite satisfactory. It will also charge through the
USB port. You don't have to charge it with the wall wart. You can use the USB port. Overall,
I'm quite satisfied with my purchase. It was not as expensive as some of the high end tablets
that you get from your cell phone carrier. The trade-off is there's no cellular connectivity,
although according to the docs, it will support those 3G dongles that you can get from cell phone
carriers. The touchscreen is fast and responsive. It's easy to read. The programs install and load
very quickly. I'm sure the two gigabytes of RAM have quite a bit to do with that. I works very
nicely as an ebook reader. I use the FB reader program. I've used it for years, both on my phone
and on my computers. But on this tablet, the touchscreen found its natural environment.
The criticisms I have in their rather minor, the ports are difficult to see, especially
in bad light. And the labels are difficult to read, especially when you open the cover,
they cover the microchip, the USB port, and the HDMI port. The labels underneath the cover are
very difficult to read. I had a couple of times got a flashlight so I can make sure I found the
right port. Now with usage, of course, you learn which port is which. The supplied earbuds for the
headphone ports have a very short lead. It's only about two feet long. I think it's overly short.
When I use it with my MP3 player, it's not long enough for me to put the my MP3 player in my pocket.
I have to put it in my shirt pocket. If I don't have a shirt pocket, I'm out of luck.
It was very inexpensive to get replacement earbuds. I've got so many earbuds lying around here.
You'd think I was an ear of corn. And there was no manual or quick start guide.
Now when you consider it's our reasons target audience, which is Linux people.
They're generally folks who are used to figuring stuff out and know what they're doing.
So from one way it makes sense, but at least suddenly you had a diagram of the ports
and the picture of the screen so that the first time I turned it on, I wouldn't have had the
hunt around. A little quick start guide would have been nice. As I say, not essential,
but it would have been nice. But if those were the only criticisms I can come up with about this
device, I'd say overalls our reasons done a pretty good job. And I'm looking forward to having
a lot of fun with this tablet. If you want to email me, you can email me at Frank at PineViewFarm.net.
PineViewFarm is all one word, no spaces, no punctuation. And my website is www.pineviewFarm.net. Thank you very much.
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