I REALLY wanted to love my Le Pan TC 970. When I saw it was the Amazon.ca deal of the week at the amazing price of $179.00 CAD I leaped at the chance to grab one. What a great price! But, wait... why so cheap? My spider sense should have warned me that if a deal is too good to be true, it usually is.
I received the Le Pan unit a few days later. It looked sleek! Nice and shiny with metal adorning it, it was also around the same size as the iPad, but seemed a bit sleeker than the original iPad model. I turned it on, eager to get started. Charged it up, then sat back to connect with my home wifi and download some apps.
That's where I ran into a major problem. The wifi would not stay "on". It kept switching off, and wouldn't scan for available wifi connections. I walked through every possible technique I knew to get this happening, including rebooting the little beast several times. Still no joy.
Then I started reading up about upgrading the OS and the ROM. Okay, I could live with Android 2.2 but I had to have workable wifi to get anything done.
By the middle of the weekend I had found a workable ROM update file, copied the three upgrade files to the root directory of the 2 gig flash card on my Le Pan unit, then followed the reboot and upgrade instructions in the FAQ. So far so good! Everything updated properly and I felt, for the first time, that I was making so some of progress.
But no luck. No wifi success. Not even with the update. I soon came to realize that the wifi was super-wonky, probably a bad component. Reading through the forum postings it seems my problem is a bit of an epidemic situation with the Le Pan. Either the units just stop working altogether or if they do turn on, you cannot connect to a wifi network you've had absolutely 100% success with when using any other device.
In my case, i've connected several iPads, a TouchPad, an Asus Transformer, Apple TV, iPhones, MacBooks, various laptops, Kindles, Kobo, etc, etc etc. NONE of them ever failed to find the network or connect up to it. I had even made my wifi an open signal temporarily, thinking, after reading some of the advice here, that it might help. No joy.
I tried once more this morning to get the wifi working by dropping in to my local McDonalds and buying a coffee and a muffin so I could sit there and test out their open wifi. No luck there either.
Sad to say, the unit was shipped back to Amazon this afternoon. Luckily Amazon has an excellent return policy (One of the reasons I purchase items from them) and I didn't get an argument from them about the return. It is winging its way back to them now.
Goodbye Le Pan TC 970. I really did try to have a relationship with you. I guess it just wasn't meant to be.
My advice (after going through 4 days of wasted effort)? Avoid this product. It may treat you right temporarily, but ultimately it will abandon you. Or, like my case, it will refuse to accept your overtures of love from the outset.
On to my next bit of research in my quest to find a reliable, affordable Android tablet...