Hi all,
I recently bought a G2W from CG Group Co., Ltd. on Aliexpress for $61.36.
Device came and video quality seemed fine.
HOWEVER it would not turn on reliably. In fact mostly it would freeze during splash screen when turned on (normally this device should turn on automatically when USB charger is connected). Only approx. 5% of the time would it turn on normally and start recording video. This made the camera mostly useless as a dashcam. I tried a few chargers (even one specified as 2.6A which should be enough!), with and without an SD card, and even several different SD cards.
I contacted the seller and was told to ship item back. However as is usually the case, shipping the item back to China would have cost almost the purchase price so I was tempted to try to solve the problem myself.
Other symptoms (as it seemed to me) is that the device would always turn off about 10sec after removing usb charger, even when configuring automatic power-off options to 3,5 or 10 minutes. Also it seemed that probability of freezing during boot decreased slightly after leaving device on charger for several hours. So this lead me to believe that perhaps it was the battery that was defective. So I opened up the camera (a bit of a challenge!) and tried (1) disconnecting the battery, and (2) soldering another battery. Neither setup changed anything to the automatic power-on problem.
So then I was tempted to try a new firmware. However I was unable to find a G2W specific firmware on the net (current firmware version was listed as 300GXXXXXX, can't remember exact numbers but corresponded to some date in August 2013). My searches resulted in a guess that the G2W is the same as the Blackview BL300, however there is no downloadable firmware for BL300 on the Blackview website. I tried firmware for BL330 (named FW96650A.bin), but this resulted in a device that will no longer boot (black screen). I tried many other FW96650A.bin firmwares but none have worked so far, although all appear to result in an attempt to load firmware from SD card (which makes blue LED go through a certain flashing sequence).
So there you go. If anyone by any chance has a pointer to a firmware for the G2W, this would be really appreciated. Otherwise I hope that perhaps this may serve as a warning to anyone else with similar symptoms...
Cheers
Rich973
I recently bought a G2W from CG Group Co., Ltd. on Aliexpress for $61.36.
Device came and video quality seemed fine.
HOWEVER it would not turn on reliably. In fact mostly it would freeze during splash screen when turned on (normally this device should turn on automatically when USB charger is connected). Only approx. 5% of the time would it turn on normally and start recording video. This made the camera mostly useless as a dashcam. I tried a few chargers (even one specified as 2.6A which should be enough!), with and without an SD card, and even several different SD cards.
I contacted the seller and was told to ship item back. However as is usually the case, shipping the item back to China would have cost almost the purchase price so I was tempted to try to solve the problem myself.
Other symptoms (as it seemed to me) is that the device would always turn off about 10sec after removing usb charger, even when configuring automatic power-off options to 3,5 or 10 minutes. Also it seemed that probability of freezing during boot decreased slightly after leaving device on charger for several hours. So this lead me to believe that perhaps it was the battery that was defective. So I opened up the camera (a bit of a challenge!) and tried (1) disconnecting the battery, and (2) soldering another battery. Neither setup changed anything to the automatic power-on problem.
So then I was tempted to try a new firmware. However I was unable to find a G2W specific firmware on the net (current firmware version was listed as 300GXXXXXX, can't remember exact numbers but corresponded to some date in August 2013). My searches resulted in a guess that the G2W is the same as the Blackview BL300, however there is no downloadable firmware for BL300 on the Blackview website. I tried firmware for BL330 (named FW96650A.bin), but this resulted in a device that will no longer boot (black screen). I tried many other FW96650A.bin firmwares but none have worked so far, although all appear to result in an attempt to load firmware from SD card (which makes blue LED go through a certain flashing sequence).
So there you go. If anyone by any chance has a pointer to a firmware for the G2W, this would be really appreciated. Otherwise I hope that perhaps this may serve as a warning to anyone else with similar symptoms...
Cheers
Rich973
