Toured a Tab 400

I think its value proposition is higher quality, at least purportedly. 

I looked at one of these last fall. It was quite well thought out. It has things that are better than the pod, and things that are worse. My immediate thought was, where the heck do you put anything.  Pretty much if you put a camp fold up chair in it, you have to tie a red flag on the end of it. It's also more expensive than a pod, and had no shore power hook ups.  I don't mind boondocking, but, I gotta have the shore power option.

Good trailer, bad dealer, go figure👎

You mean like the Curt Echo? The BT is only for interfacing with your phone for setup, the accelerometers and pwm controls themselves built into the controller, so it is “hardwired” just like one that goes under the dash, and you don’t need BT to get your trailer to stop. It just doesn’t have a physical user interface.

So, the drawbacks are that there isn’t an easily accessible manual activation feature if you want that (you have to launch the app first) and boy as you say it’s not cheap. Personally I use manual activation pretty frequently and I’m stingy so I’ll stick with my traditional controller too. If you had several tow vehicles and/or trailers this kind of controller might be interesting.