[G Tablet General] roebeet:
Others have stated the same (and one person even thinks that their bootloader is actually broken), but I don't agree. I mentioned this in another thread, but will mention it here as well.

First off, my day job is a senior sysadmin. I get paid to troubleshoot and to think five steps ahead. I've collected all the evidence I've seen over the last month with Viewsonic and taken some educated guesses:

1- Their bootloader is not broken. Assuming that you've never installed a mod before, it seems to work very well (as long as you have 3588 as your baseline). Don't believe me? I've had more than a few success stories from people you used TNT Lite 5.0 as their FIRST mod, on a clean device. Plus, a clean 3588 (with recovery) actually updates the bootloader - this tells me that there is a purposeful design, here. If the bootloader were actually broken or if this was not designed for the GTAB, then 3588 stock should have never worked as a pre-req.

2- Viewsonic doesn't develop with mods and clockworkmod in mind. They only care about stock devices, and stock devices are generally unaffected by the upgrade. This is the one that I seem to find the hardest thing to convey to people. When the majority of problems are clockworkmod based (either reversion to 3588 or upgrading with clockworkmod) those are actually non-issues in Viewsonic's mind.

The only issue that affects them, tmk, is that older stock ROMs will break with a direct upgrade (I tested 2967, for example). My guess is that they realized this during testing and have spent the last month trying to figure out if they can find a way to get older ROM users up to a "gateway" ROM, like 3588, before re-upgrading them to the 1.2 dev branch. If they backpedal to 1.1, I suspect that their failure to figure out how to code this upgrade path is the issue.

Example: Some one buys a device in SEARS today, it's most likely 2967. If you offer them 3991 (or higher) from the start as the OTA path, it will fail. That's the issue they have to figure out how to avoid.

3- The build.prop, file name, location and general setup all point to a real release. I actually think that this was supposed to be a release and not a UAT, but they chose not to release it. I've ripped open enough of these to be able to tell the difference between that and something like the Viewpad 10s firmware (which IS very different).

4- "1.2" in the name. "1.0.1" and "1.1" preceded it in actual releases. It's a new dev branch - I don't see this as unusual, they've decided to shore up some of the issues in 1.1. 1.1 dropped extra languages, and 1.2 is adding two of them back.

5- (Most important of all). I've talked to CS several times, and they have a notice of an impending release coming. It will include:

- A Lockscreen

- Spanish and French languages

These are both in stock 3991. This leads me to believe that 3991 (or something newer based on the 1.2 dev branch) is going to be their next release.

Of course, I could be totally wrong and their next release will re-add the old bootloader and the old kernel. But if they do that they'd have to add all the items in 3991 back into their old dev branch. I'm guessing that there's a good chance that their next release will be based on 1.2, going on what I've seen and heard so far.

It will be back in a few days. Just cleaning up my documentation to make abolutely sure the instructions are clear, concise and not too long. :)