I have an original Stream, as well as a 2. This should be fun...

I actually wonder what board it is. Feels pi-ish to me, but not the pi3. By the way, the Trek is using a Qualcom Snapdragon chipset.

I'd like to know the specifications of the MPower and Apex. I heard the MPower uses Double A batteries. Is this true?

since the apex in question, I had to be careful with, as that wasn't mine. basically, under the battery, below the tiny tape, is the RAM. if the unit doesn't boot up, that's what they replace. when you remove the 6 screws out of the thing, which, as mentioned, you can use the most ever basic screw driver you have,  you have 2 panels. the top panel, with the braille display, keyboard, etc, and the bottom panel. I didn't really want to examine the bottom panel, but basically, these 2 panels and elements are all nicely tangled up with some cables, and there goes the apex. not special at all. pretty much any computer shop, that dealt with hardware, could repair it, as long as you don't take the braille display apart. .
MPOWER. first, you gotta tare out the 2 back legs. at that point, you can remove the 6 screws, 2 in front, 2 in middle, 2 below what is now the exposed legs. the good news is, after taring out the legs, you can actually put them back, if they don't get too dirty. they won't lose their stickiness.
once that's done, the MPOWER will fall in your lap. the first thing we will notice is the 2 sets of thumb keys are only held in by 2 wires at the edge. no screws, no clips, nothing. so as soon as I lift up the upper panel, the thumb keys start dangling in the air. next to that, we have the braille display, which is again, held in by 5 screws. when I unscrewed those 5 screws, I took off this metal sheet, that was above the display. I was able to partially remove the actual display, but those tough humanware wires. I don't have any knowledge of properly disconnecting those. but as long as you don't physically open up the display, it won't fall apart. now, at the bottom of the top panel, you find 6 standard, exactly like in a TV remote, batteries. since this MPOWER in question lost it's product key, and has a broken reset button, and I have one that works, I decided to rip out the batteries. so basically, the 6 batteries, tighed together with some kind of a tape, were taped down to the board. so I had to first destroy the tape on the frame, which I was able to do with my handy screw driver. I was able to, just like the braille display, remove the batteries. the idea was to put them into my other MPOWER, but again, the wires.  basically, anyone who knows how to do the wires, you can replace the batteries, or even the display yourself, as long as you have another element to put in instead. of course the back panel, with all the ports is also visible. I'm not sure what you guys would like to know in particular, I may have missed something. I'd do a little audio demo,  but I have nothing decent to record with. as for the back panel, the bottom of the unit, that just has some wires, and possibly the flash drive, etc. all in all, the apex and mPower seem to be using very similar, if not identical structure. with that said, if there is enough demand, I can produce some kind of an audio, but it won't be professional.

@jack Thanks, I have replied to your PM.

Hey guys just bringing this back to prepare for any bricking situations i might have with my new generation victor stream. So i know the thing runs off that micro SD car under the baterie, but what happens if it won't boot? Is there a way i can dump the firmware on it to fix it just in case, i don't like the idea of sending it back to Humanware, i'd rather do it myself. Any help appreciated.

Oh wow, I didn't think this thing would come back. Well, here goes...

If you're going to be modifying the Stream software, I'd suggest either not tampering with the original card or making sure you've made a good working backup. I'm honestly not interested enough to do this because I'm not a developer, and I don't have enough Linux knowledge yet to go cloning partitions and the like.

I can think of plenty of cool things to add to the Stream. Humanware seems to have abandoned the project which pisses me off! There's so much they could do. Let's see, what do I want?
1. The ability to browse, stream, and download files from local SMB network shares. My super awesome idea was to get a Raspberry Pi, connect a hard drive with a ton of audio, and wirelessly access all that content from the intuitive controls of the Stream.
2. A network transfer mode to transfer files to the SD card and/or internal SD card from a computer. This may or may not be worth it, especially when you consider how awful the Book Port's network folder feature is. The fastest speeds I ever achieved were just shy of 500 kbps which is ridiculous!
3. The ability to send audio to Chromecast and AirPlay receivers. The device has Wi-Fi, so why not? I want to play books and music on all my Google Homes and Chromecast Audios scattered around the house in sync.
4. Access to the Broadcastify database. We have ooTunes, so why not access to police, fire, etc radio streams as well?
5. Access to the dictionary.com and thesaurus.com websites. There are times when I want simple lists of definitions, and Wiktionary is crap!
6. Support for drives formatted as NTFS and ExFAT.
7. The ability to Stream podcasts in addition to downloading them.
8. USB keyboard support. I hate the classic telephone keypad typing crap!
9. YouTube? I don't know if this one is feasible. What kind of hardware are we looking at with the Stream? What are the specifications for the processor and RAM? Does anyone know? I'm really curious, but Humanware probably wouldn't tell me.
10. Download speed notifications. I'd like to know how quickly items are downloading and why the Wi-Fi is so damn slow. Is it because there's a really crummy processor inside the unit?
11. The ability to record to the internal memory and save podcasts and other web content to the SD card.

I really hope the Stream isn't abandoned. They come out with this cool unit with Wi-Fi capabilities, and all they do is add support for book services, web radio, NFB Newsline, references via Wikipedia/Wiktionary, time synchronization, and podcasts? Come on! There's so much more we can do! I want this to be a really awesome product!

Now, I'm turning my attention to the Book Port Plus. APH abandoning the product pisses me off! I'm especially pissed because I paid for their online books update which never worked as advertised! I reported the issues, but no patches were released, and I think they've all broken except for Bookshare. That product had a lot of potential as well, but it looks like nothing will be happening with that now. I tried to get someone from APH to tell me the hardware specifications, but I was told they weren't giving up that info because people might try to hack it. Well, if you people want to abandon the product, why not?

So I'm curious. Does anyone know the specifications of the device? All I know is it uses an 802.11 B/G radio. How about the CPU, RAM, and internal storage capacity? Is it running Windows CE Embedded? What does it use for Network Folder? Is it a really old version of SMB? Does it have a Telnet server?

How did you execute batch scripts on the unit? If you can get the hardware info, that would be interesting.

Why couldn't the Stream handle most of the features above? Yes, YouTube is most likely out of the question, but everything else shouldn't require a ton of processing power.

If the Trek has those specifications, the Stream must be significantly worse. Maybe a single core and half the RAM? No wonder downloads are so slow. Now I really want to know what the Book Port Plus has, because that device is worse than the Stream in terms of performance.

why not youtube though? yes no video, but audio still works, and the hims note takers used to have youtube, granted, they are way more powerful, well, maybe not, but they had youtube. and the hims blaze had skype. hmm, tt for the vr stream? heh

OK so keep in mind with your idea of modding the stream. I haven't messed with it much so who knows maybe it's actually possible, but I'm guessing most of the stream's firmware is compiled to native machine code from C or some other language like that. So in order to casually mod the stream, it's not a question of writing some new code and quick throwing together a new update image and installing it. You'd have to find away to disassemble the stream's binary, modify it, and then recompile it. To some extent maybe you could hexedit the binary without decompiling it first, but you'd hardly get anything done. Most of the features suggested require a lot of code, and unless you could get the actual source code for the stream, I doubt anyone is going to be adding any of those any time soon. Now as I said I've never messed with the stream myself, so if anyone can prove me wrong here that would be fuckin awesome lol

Their own code isn't gpl licensed, so that would explain it. And @Chris: The Stream's processor is tiny, trust me. That's no Pi0 powering that thing. Notice how the STream2 isn't light as a feather without the battery, and the Trek is beefed up a bit? Yeah, the Stream2 has just enough processing power to run its 1 software stack and background processes for downloading stuff. Because at the time, that was all that was needed.
The STream2, I believe, is also running an outdated Linux kernel. How can I tell the processor is slow as all hell? Well, the sd card in my Trek loads ten times faster than it would if it were in my stream2. So PDF recognition would be a slow drag on the stream2. Which is why it doesn't look like it's getting those features. If you can afford the Trek/sell your stream to put money towards one, I would highly recommend it. You wouldn't be losing anything from the Victor Reader side of things, with the exception of Audible Format 4 removal (only audible enhanced formats are supported.)