[G Tablet Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] TJEvans:
well, now you know the what and how, but what about the why and the history...

Viewsonic is a basically a repackager. they put their name on a product and sell it to the masses. US Merchants is the US company that imports these products from China. The Chinese company that actually builds them is called Malata.

Malata is also responsible for the Notion Ink Adam as well as some other Tegra 2 based tablets.

The odd part comes in to play when you look at the bootlaoders for each device. Notion Ink always used a 1.2 bootloader for their Adam updates and firmwares. Viewsonic, though, was using what is assumed to be an older version of firmware based on the 1.1 branch. There is a lot of speculation as to why this is, and there is no real answer.

Now, back in February, one of the devs got a hold of a firmware labelled 3391. He discovered that it was on a different bootloader than the G-Tablet was currently using. he messed around with it a bit, but it proved to be difficult to crack at the time, since everyone was on 1.1 and it wasn't an official update, so nobody really had it.

Then, Viewsonic hadn't released an official update for a while. Users were getting irritated, and a mass request went out for Viewsonic to do SOMETHING...they did, they released the 4349 firmware, but then pulled it 24 hours later. It's still known as the most recent officla firmware, thought it's not available anymore (officially) 4349 also ended up being a 1.2 firmware. SO, now since this was an official update, the developer that was messing with 3391 figured that this was the direction that Viewsonic/Malata was going to go. He made his opinions known but was rejected by some of the mods here at XDA.

Since then, he has graciously moved to another forum where he houses all of his 1.2 roms. He took it upon himself ot convert his older roms to the newer 1.2 bootloader (Brilliant Corners, Mountain Laurel). He also created a seperate Clockwork mod that will work on 1.2 bootlaoder as well.

It was discovered that the new 1.2 bootloader from Viewsonic was the same bootloader that Adam had been using all along. It seemed that Viewsonic was either using, or getting outdated software from Malata. So, now we can also use Adam Roms and Kernels on our G-Tablets as well.

Honeycomb was ported from another device, but enabled to use the 1.2 bootloader. It's still in Alpha stages, but does require the 1.2 bootloader to flash.

Essentially, 3588 was the LAST 1.1 official updated firmware directly from Viewsonic. The only way that it can be improved upon is if we get more 1.1 official updates from Viewsonic. But, since we haven't recieved ANY updates from Viewsonic, we're not holding our breath.

4349 was the FIRST (and as of now ONLY) 1.2 official update from Viewsonic.

Fortunately for G-Tablet users, the Adam bootloader being compatible with our 1.2 bootlaoder opens the door for infinate possibilities. We are no longer dependant on VS to provide updates, as updates from Notion Ink can be ported more easily.

it's been suggested that the older 1.1 roms e converted to 1.2 roms ot avoid confusion and unexpected softbricks caused by such confusion, but there is resistence.