@Chris:
I believe the Stream2 is using a freescale 580MHz single-core arm11 CPU. The Braillenote Apex used something from the freescale series, I imagine the Stream2's is weaker due to it being an embedded device. Put simply, network file browsing capability would probably make you wish they'd never implemented it in the first place.
Also, say all you want about Humanware, but they are a lot better than Hims as far as support is concerned, coming from personal experience. Sent me a free brand new Trek replacement after my original battery exploded, never mind the fact that my warranty is over. Pre-owned Blaze ET from Hims appears to have fried? Mainboard replacement would be on me and I wouldn't find out how much it costs till we get a quote, no doubt it wouldn't be under $100 from what I'm told.
Also, people who purchased a Braillenote Touch very recently are in line for an even steeper discount on the Touch Plus upgrade, and may even get it for free. It's early adopters that are hit the hardest ($1300 is the highest price one will pay for an upgrade). But early adoption is risky business in the tech industry nowadays, not just for assistive tech. The entire friggin smart home business is an early adoption nightmare (remember the Revolv system that was set to be a universal smart home hub? Well, Nest acquired it, discontinued (and bricked) the original Revolv. People got refunded the $300 they spent on Revolv, but now they had to get a new hub for all their smart home appliances that now no longer worked without a hub. So couple early adoption with Humanware's essential early adoption of Android as a hole, and you've got a logistical nightmare. Humanware jumped on the train when Android was still a maturing platform, 2013 to be exact. The Touch began development when Android accessibility was just beginning to improve, so while Google worked closely with Humanware on development, a lot of shit had to be expanded upon to make the speech and braille experience seemless. Midway through development, the chip that the Touch was based off of, Texas Instruments Omap4 board to be exact, had its support dropped (that's why the Galaxy Nexus never got Kitkat.) Humanware having already started development probably didn't have the budget to just scrap the device and start over on a new board. So they did somehow manage to get an extended support agreement with Texas Instruments, which is probably what actually led them to believe they could upgrade the Android version of the Touch past 4.4.2. Also keep in mind that at the time, 4.4.2 was the Android version that had the most stable accessibility framework. Now, that Android version is Oreo. Well that extended support came and went. So here we are in 2019, and the Android accessibility framework has seen substantial improvement, so HUmanware can now enter the new Android market. The Qualcom Snapdragon820 board is an excellent board for the Touch, it is running Android Oreo currently, and I am told it's definitely getting Pie soon. I even asked if it's getting Android Q, despite the horrifying isolated storage issue (I'm keeping tabs on it testing the beta builds of Q on my Pixel2), and they said working around Q's limitations and allowing filesystem access was on their radar.

Actually, to be brutally honest, the Victor series has just been energy-efficient no matter the cpu. The dragonboard410C doesn't drain the battery on the Trek. Even with the GPS on, you can still get a good 10 to 12 hours, and with gps turned off your battery is usually about the same.
Also, keep in mind the yearly royalties Humanware has to pay to all these services they contract/partner with for the Stream. Acapela is a yearly deal. I wouldn't be surprised if  Amazon were clawing at their funds as much as they can since Audible is still present, considering how they treated Pay with Chip Marketplace. And everything else that the Stream/Trek gets integrated. In the case of the Trek, they have to pay Tomtom royalties for a license to not only utilize the maps, but for the ability to modify them (Humanware does doctor them to make them more blind/pedestrian-friendly) so it's not like they're slapping the maps onto the Trek and calling it a done deal. And even after that, map updates are free on the Trek because Humanware wanted them to be either free or as low as possible since they were not looking to make profits off the maps.
Also I hope no one's buying Streams off Amazon, because then Humanware would be barely getting any value for those sales.
So when they charge what they do for these devices, they're nowhere close to five figures in disposable profits on a regular basis like mainstream companies would be.
Indeed, they are closely looking at the low-cost braille market kicked off by the Orbit20, but they are not going to integrate it into their own products until it actually matures and become acceptable in the mainstream, with a stable market (the fallout between APH and Orbit proves that either there's a conflict of interest, or the braille market is just too small for innovation at low prices). So until then, Humanware has chosen to stick to the tried and true braille technology, because as expensive as it is for both them and the customers, it insures that their products are still at a high quality standard. And with there being only one braille manufacturing company that is actually staying afloat (Metek), there is no competition to decide the price of these piezoelectric actuation braille cells. Baum is struggling (at least in the US, not sure about Germany).

Lol that stream is so lo powerred, even lower than a 50 dollars android phone, or just an amazon fire, but I believe that thing is toooo big for most people to travel with.
But now really you can get a cheap android phone and use it as a book player, pair it with a big power bank and you get a book player, with great battery life and you can also charrge your actual phone from that.
Btw, I know that there is another player which is using Ivona voices, has internet suport and it is like 200 dollars on accessiblemp3players.com, but do not take my info as very good, because I said something close to the price of that thing, from what I remember.
Does someone know what is the name of that thing?

The bpp has both samantha and tom on it. The drive in it has to be at least 2 gb because you have either 1 gb or 30 minuts of voice memmoes on inturnal and you also have to think about the software

I bet you the BPP has less than a GB of storage. The operating system probably takes up a large chunk of the available space. When you add one Vocalizer voice which is probably 100 to 150 MB plus the human voice clips, there's probably not much to work with. It's a shame these devices have such horrid processors. If someone can get the specs, I'm still very interested.

Why would network browsing be terrible on the Stream? I can see it might take a little while to download large files, but aside from that, it should work okay if you just want to browse lists of folders and/or play files. That would make so much sense on a device like that. Imagine the amount of data you could have instant access to.

If the Stream isn't abandoned, what are they planning next? I haven't heard anything, and the last update was a minor one over a year ago to fix podcasts and add new voice clips. Again, I'm not asking for extremely hardcore features here, just a few more interesting Internet and networking features related to audio, which is what the device is designed for.

As for network browsing, there's only so much tentative space the device can handle before it completely flips. Remember that it pre-scans the media on a medium so that browsing and playing it is seemless. My 128gb sd card hadn't even been close to being filled to the brim, I'd say about 70gb, and yet the stream took forever and a day to load everything into memory, whereas the Trek takes less than half that speed.
If you're going to send feature requests, you should send them to [email protected] and not [email protected]. That is the fastest route to their actual development team.
Remember that use royalties are pretty substantial for a smaller company. They must pay Intel per-use royalties as they do for Qualcom now, Amazon's gotta be getting plenty of royalties for Audible support, and Acapela is a yearly royalty to keep their license. If they were building this thing on a Raspberry Pi (if they were even common back then) then they of course would not have to pay royalties for the processor at least. This is why these processors can't just be bought off the shelf (unless a company has specifically made a development board for such purpose, think dragonboard410c.) Chipsets are only available through contract, so often the price per unit is a rumor as the real prices are probably not only under ndc, but probably pre-arranged between the chipmaker and the company buying them. And even after that you have usage royalties. It's a hot mess, and this is what the open source diy market primarily exists for.

well, wanted to revive that topic because it sounds really interesting, did someone find a way to reveal hidden partitions on plextalk or book port? If so, i'm really curious how to do that. Regards.

Bringing this back because I'm interested in it. Anyone had any luck? Also can someone repost the dtbm manuals