I've now owned my ZT180 for a week. It did ship from the USA, and came with the latest firmware (1030). After a week, I'm sure there are things about the OS I don't know, but I think I've learned the basics and can get by on the device. Slatedroid seems to be cleaning up from a failed forum software migration and had a lot of bad links when I first started looking for help. Bad timing for me since that's where I was expecting to find answers. They now appear to be mostly, if not completely, back.
Nothing special about the packaging. Just a power adapter and a tiny user guide that covered turning the device on. I decided to leave the factory screen protector in place until I can get a better one.
First few days were spent trying to find where various settings were located, and program names for various tasks. This is my first Android device so I was doing a lot of reading and searching. Biggest problem at this time was the touch screen. I felt it was too sensitive and would launch programs while I was trying to slide screens. Android Market worked fine and I downloaded a bunch of apps from there. Only thing I can think of that didn't work were the animated wallpapers. Not a real big deal.
Next few days were trying to get adb working (part of the developer package and used to push files or settings onto the device). For some reason, the program doesn't recognize the ZT180. I need to find some help files for it since most of the places I've seen it called out, they assume you know how to run it. Since I couldn't get adb working, I cannot install Flash Lite 9.1 which is the only Flash that is known to work on the pad.
Day 5, I noticed the Market no longer works. I can select something for download, it attempts and fails. Then never goes back to try again (rebooted and left it sitting for 12 hours once). The Google Help response is to reboot the device and try again 10 minutes later. Slatedroid posts say to leave it on and it will eventually get the files. Several posts about this on the Zenithink website forums but no answer from the company. It still connects to my Gmail and youtube accounts so I don't think it's something simple like lost the username/password.
I decided to restore the device to factory default by burning the 1030 firmware. This went fine. Zenithink provides the files and the burntool from their website.
Market still doesn't work. I had hoped the problem was caused by me in my ignorance. I reset it again and this time created a new google account in hopes that would fix the market. Didn't work. Not sure what to do about it now other than find another place to download apps and hope it starts working. There's one at slideme.org
I figured out my problem with sliding was too little pressure and trying to cover too much distance. Short slide gestures work better.
It plays youtube videos through an app. No problems with that. Videos on other websites are hit and miss. If you copy video files to a flashdrive the tablet will play them without a problem, but I cannot get it to play files hosted on a different computer across my home network. Using SMB I can see the files on a shared drive, but can't access them even with permissions set to their most lax.
Would I recommend it to someone? On day one and two, yes I would have, now I'm not sure about recommending it without a working marketplace. Some apps are not available anywhere except the official marketplace. If you don't care about the market, then yeah, it's a nice tablet. I paid $195 but I've seen it for $175 (shipped from China)
If you're wanting it for web browsing you'll be happy with it. The default browser works fine and there are several others to try. I've been using Skyfire since it was most often recommended. WiFi connectivity is great. I've never noticed it fail, and I can take the tablet to the basement (router is on 2nd floor).
I'm not having anywhere near the horror stories I've read about people buying the smaller $100 tablets, or the ZT180 buyers whose tablets won't turn on at all. I'm sure there are many tablet owners who would like to have one whose only problem it the market doesn't work
Hope it helps,
Misellus