A Visit To The AiShuo Factory

Recently my personal assistant and I made a trip to the AiShuo factory to try to get some answers to all the QC problems of late. Armed with both technical and non-technical questions, I was determined to try to get to the bottom of the issues with the MID816/A816 and other AiShuo made tablets. Read on to find out what we discovered (or didn't).

First some background on this tablet. For those who don't know, the Herotab MID816 is the AiShuo A816, there is absolutely no difference. However, more Western consumers are familiar with the brand Herotab, while Chinese consumers know it as the AiShuo A816. All retailers get their stock from the same factory, we all have to work with the same supply channel. However, some retailers stockpile larger inventory, and therefore have older stock longer. That explains why some retailers still have the rubberized model, while the rest of us don't. Lower inventory levels means more current firmware and body styles, which is usually a better thing. The end-buyer experience will largely depend on the customer service that your retailer provides. The QC done at the factory is laughable... in fact, it could be the worst out of all the MID factories I am familiar with. Therefore it's important to choose a retailer like TechToys2go.com that fully checks your tablet before it's sent out. To add confusion to the mix, there are other factories cloning the A816. They run the same firmware that AiShuo has spent resources creating, and have pushed AiShuo to be very competitive on price. That is why the price of the resistive A/MID816 has dropped by 25% in only several months. (with us from $199 in March to $149 now). The capacitive screen version is still priced higher because there is no clone of it available yet, pushing down the price. This fierce copying/cloning has even reportedly prompted AiShuo to change the encryption on the IC from April 10 production onwards. This means that older built tablets need to be returned to the factory to be modified in order to further update the firmware (to be fair the factory has not officially admitted or denied this last point)

We were picked up by one of the owners, Mr. Wu in his late model BMW and taken to the factory. The factory is located on a single floor of a new building that also houses other businesses and factories. The factory is not big by Chinese factory standards, but it has obviously been successful in taking full advantage of the iPad phenomenon, not unlike other shanzhai factories. Mr. Wu proudly explained how they recently moved their factory down the street from their older, smaller facility. When we arrived at the factory, he took us into the board room where I began to ask him some detailed questions.

I started by asking him about the battery problems that the tablets are experiencing lately. He admitted that there was an issue with a shipment of battery controller ICs that they received from a supplier. He said that the voltage of the ICs were slightly different from spec. The numbers he gave my assistant, I believe, were 1.2V (correct) and 1.3V (incorrectly installed). He continued by saying that it there was only a "limited" number of units that "slipped out the door" and that the problem had now been rectified. He accused me of being overly critical of "a small, limited, non-issue... in a product that ships 10,000 units a month." Take that quote however you like. I then told him that his own sales staff could still not guarantee that my orders would be free of battery issues, as recently as two days ago. He invited me to have a look at the assembly line and see for myself.

The factory lines consisted of two rooms, one manufacturing the bena circuit boards, and one assembling the tablets themselves. At the time, two products were under production. The A/MID816 and a new product, some sort of HD, presumably android-based media server. Exact details seemed a little secretive, but I was there to try to find answers to the battery issues of the A/MID816. I picked up a newly-assembled, white, capacitive screen A/MID816 and checked the battery status in the settings. It showed around 68% (I forget exactly). In front of the owner I plugged in the charger. It immediately jumped 10%. Unplugging the charger had the reverse effect, the battery dropped back down. I did this several times in a row, all to the same effect. The factory owner looked a little surprised, but recovered quickly and made a comment about how many devices "such as the iPhone" read the battery differently depending on the charging condition (on or off). I explained that the real issue for customers is that when the tablet is "fully" charged and THEN one pulls out the charger, the tablet shows a MAX of 85% or so... sometimes far less. People assume that their tablets won't fully charge and are therefore defective! At this point he got on his phone and made a number of private calls that we were not able to overhear. I honestly believe that he didn't even know his tablets are showing this behaviour.

It would appear to me that we are looking at 2 separate battery issues, one hardware, and one firmware. According to Mr. Wu, the hardware issue has already been corrected by the factory, but unfortunate owners of the "limited numbers" of defective battery controllers will have to have their units serviced for IC replacement. As for the software issue, I trust Mr. Wu is at least looking into things a little deeper now. He has promised to send me new firmware in a week or so to hopefully address this issue, but that could just be a brushoff. Only time will tell. He did say one thing that made perfect sense. He said he plans on doing further testing to ensure that the tablets are getting 4 hours of normal use per charge. Just because our tablets read 68%, 75%, 86% or whatever, doesn't mean that they really are at that level. Ultimately, this is the best test. If your tablet is getting 4 hours on a charge then you're doing fine, and don't sweat the numbers. A firmware fix should eventually come to address how the software reports the levels.