[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Tzul:
Thanks! Yes, I saw that, and no, I wasn't offended at all.

I've been registered on xda for over a year now, by the way, I'm just not very active.

Basically, you need a scatter file first. Luckily I already had one, from those Russian custom recovery releases.

You start the SPFT, go to the Download tab, load the scatter file, then go to the Readback tab and add one or more address ranges.

Then you click the Read Back button and connect the powered-off phone/tablet.

The required data for the address ranges can be found in the scatter file: Start Address = linear_start_addr, Length = partition_size, Region = region.

The "Region" setting might not exist for some older devices; the main partitions are all in the EMMC_USER region anyway.

So, you can add one range for each partition, which has the advantage that the SPFT will save each to separate files, but the disadvantage that it's a bit tedious.

Or you can add one single range that encompasses all the partitions... Looking at the scatter file, you'll see that "userdata" is the last regular partition; there are two after it, but they have a negative start address (beginning with 0xFFFF) and are marked as reserved - ignore those. Anyway, userdata starts at 0x8F800000 and has a length (size) of 0x49C00000. In case you didn't know, those are hexadecimal numbers. Add them with a suitable calculator, and you get 0xD9400000. Meaning if you define a readback range with start address 0 and length 0xD9400000, the SPFT will save all EMMC_USER partitions up to and including "userdata" in one swoop to a single file on your PC. Congratulations, you got yourself a full backup. However, if you need to restore a specific partition, let's say nvram, you first need to extract it from that big file. Which might be difficult for inexperienced users. You can use a hex editor together with the address and size data from the scatter file again. Or write a little program that splits/extracts the file, which is what I did.

If you don't have a proper scatter file for a new device yet, it should still be possible to do a full backup with the SPFT's readback function, and worry about the proper partitioning later, but it's a bit more complicated then.

Nope. I just started testing the stock 4.4.4 firmware.

My tablet arrived with the latest Android 5.0.1 firmware preinstalled, and I didn't have any problem with it - except for the dynamic backlight.

MiraVision (even when set to standard/disabled) or some other piece of software dynamically adjusts the brightness of the LCD backlight depending on the current screen content. I can't stand that. To easily see the effect in all of its terrible glory, you need to turn the screen backlight to minimum, start Solid Explorer in landscape mode, go to its settings and enable the dark theme, then return to the main Solid Explorer screen and press one of the material design "+" buttons on the bottom. That will darken one half of the screen, and you can literally watch how the screen backlight suddenly and automatically turns brighter to "compensate" for the darker screen content.

I often use my tablet in low light for reading, and therefore prefer a dim backlight. My previous tablet, the Nook HD+, was great in that regard. It could turn the backlight lower than I've ever seen on any phone or tablet. The A10-70 is unfortunately almost too bright on its lowest setting as is... I definitely don't need some stupid automatic backlight adjustment that makes things even worse. Add to that the copious white backgrounds of Android 5, and I was a bit annoyed.

Therefore I downgraded to the Android 4.4.4 firmware. Looks good so far, the automatic backlight nonsense doesn't happen here, or at least not as frequently (definitely not in the Solid Explorer test case I described). And it does feel quite a bit smoother than Android 5. I'm using Apex Launcher, and tweaked some stuff with Xposed + GravityBox.

Xposed works fine in Lollipop on this tablet, I was using it. You just have to install the proper version. I explained it here in German. In English:

You gotta read this and read this.

Android 5.0.1 =SDK21, and this tablet runs in ARM 64 bit mode.

Ergo: download xposed-v##-sdk21-arm64.zip, copy it to the tablet, and install it with a custom recovery. The first boot afterwards can take several minutes, just like official updates, don't worry and don't be impatient. Also download and install the latest XposedInstaller app (currently XposedInstaller_3.0_alpha4.apk ), to manage the modules.

On Android 4.4.4, GravityBox can't properly rearrange all the quicksetting tiles (auto rotate and settings tiles aren't recognized, the Dolby tile isn't either, unsurprisingly; the extended battery info tile produced a graphics bug). Just a minor gripe, otherwise it's working well.

You should use the latest version, v5.1532 currently.