What it turned out to be

The answer to the question in the title is that the categories were never really separate. Underneath, this is one Generalplus reference platform. A brand licenses it, changes a splash screen, and ships it into a different market — and the economics never justify removing what the new product doesn't use.

So the microscope carries three and a half seconds of spoken lane-departure warnings it cannot play, a date-stamp overlay picker for footage it will never record, an update mechanism named for a car video recorder, and two sound effects that exist only as names in a table.

And underneath that, the parts that are actually load-bearing somewhere else: drivers for two named accelerometers, a parking mode waiting for an impact that will never come, a second video pipeline for a camera that was never fitted, and the machinery to act as a USB host for one you might plug in. None of it removed, because removing it would have cost someone a day and left the device working exactly as well.

The part that deserves more attention than the joke: that update mechanism accepts any file of the right name from the SD card root and writes it straight to flash, with no signature, no checksum and no version check. That is not a quirk of one brand's build. It is the reference implementation, which makes it the behaviour of every device on this platform.

Which is also the only reason any of this was possible. The same missing safety check that makes the device trivially modifiable is the one that makes it trivially destroyable — and the manufacturer spent four emails insisting there was no firmware to give.