abramq

Ahem, yes. I agree. I've to admit that I've not decided whether the same name for both boards is just worse or the H5 variant now being called 'Zero Plus Ultra 2' could even be worse. At least the whole naming scheme is already f*cked up to the max  

Why should we? I consider all these single antenna 2.4GHz Wi-Fi implementations crap, they perform more or less the same and environment matters way more than the chip used: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/3739-wi-fi-performance-and-known-issues-on-sbc/&do=findComment&comment=27158
 
AP6212 has BT though so if you can make use of it...
 
 
 
Why should it? Well, there are some stubborn parrots active on the net constantly yelling stuff they don't even understand ('SD card bad, NAND good!') but reality looks different as usual. Most eMMC show way better random IO performance than the average SD card but the cheap eMMC chips especially with low capacity will be easily outperformed by good SD cards if it's about sequential transfer speeds (KLMxGxxEPD-B031 as used by FriendlyELEC on their NanoPi is rated for only 7MB/s (8 GB) or 12 MB/s (16 GB) sequential write speeds, the 7MB/s are personally confirmed by me and SinoVoip folks use even slower 8GB eMMC modules on their most recent boards).
 
The good news: If we can trust the Aliexpress pictures for Zero Plus 2 then it's the same 8GB eMMC as used on OPi PC Plus and this is rather fast (but who knows... Xunlong might change that later since most users pay no attention to those details)
 
Regarding longevity: No idea, I don't know of any serious tests regarding this. But it's easy to imagine what's necessary when eMMC breaks compared to SD card. BGA soldering vs. simple exchange. Also your 'use case' of powering off the device without sane shutdown is not related to the physical layer since you will suffer from filesystem corruption. FriendlyELEC has something like a 'NEO power dock' with the ability to provide battery (backup) power -- no idea how that works but you might want to check this first.
 
Regarding camera: the difference between 2MP and 5MP should be obvious, same with the 'you get what you pay for' principle and I would check software support first.

Well, if you think one sort of cheap RealTek crap would be better than another then at least be assured that I did some testing already and will never ever buy such an USB dongle since you can judge already by looking at it (mini aerial) what to expect: https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/2586-realtek-rtl8192eu-wifi-driver/?p=18413
 
BTW: never had any stability problems with 8189FTV but of course you can't expect any performance from this kind of Wi-Fi. Also when you feed the custom google powered search (see my sig below) with eg 'RTL8188 driver' it should also be obvious what to avoid if in doubt.

None, if you don't need Ethernet. Just choose OPi Lite instead since you'll never ever get any USB Wi-Fi dongle for the price difference ($2) that will 'perform as good' as OPi Lite's RTL8189FTV.
 
There were some problems with a missing driver in the beginning but those have been resolved pretty soon. So don't let you fool by outdated forum posts (especially when not from Armbian forum since there are many OS images for OPi boards around that completely miss a Wi-Fi driver for OPi Lite -- important to understand all those whining in official OPi forums) and please also keep in mind that this is still single antenna 2.4 GHz low power Wi-Fi behind a pretty slow SDIO bus (still better than el cheapo USB Wi-Fi sticks, even those that cheat on you and talk about '150 Mbps' or even '300 Mbps')

Than you don't have much choices except Bluetooth and WiFi direct. In both cases expect troubles and stick to modern kernel, where you have more chances of success. 
 
For example: I can use BT keyboard and mouse nicely with Cubietruck running kernel 4.9.7 ... I didn't test sending and receiving files to mobile phone.

In my experience, wifi has always be unreliable and a waste of power. I think there is some nonsense with wifi : you cannot have middle range and high bandwidth networks on an overcrowded frequency. What we need is what bluetooth should become : LE/AMP/mesh. LE stand for low energy : having the capacity to transmit small messages or rest in standby with very little power. AMP is the possibility to dynamically open a high bandwidth channel when needed. Mesh is the possibility to have a micro network of redundant nodes and links with short range / low power transmission, instead of interfering with others transmissions in wide areas as with wifi.
 
Unfortunately, the specification for that has been more or less released. Which means that current implementation is a mess. In first versions, BT was supposed to be cheap (but reliable) technology for specific use cases ("profiles"). Now, adding LE/AMP/Mesh simply mean multiply complexity by 4.
 
Nevertheless, at present you should be able to do wifi in ad hoc mode and use obex with bt ? I never tried wifi ad hoc and obex since bluez4. What are the problems ?

Which requires hiring someone talented for a few weeks/months to finish CSI framework with mainline kernel

It's closed source technology, require firmware to run, it's know to cause problems. This simply means that it's to avoid in first place. There are other and better ways for wireless comm.
 
Hardware maker are just people / engineers which sometimes overestimate and make mistakes. If you add commercial agenda to this, things become only worse. For a board which cost 9 USD shipped, 1 USD is a lot . And they don't invest much into software. This goes from zero up to just a little. Even software is "free", it cost a lot of money to develop it.
 
Armbian makes things closer to ordinary users and saves time, but we can't make a perfectly smooth plug and play operating system. Just remember to have fun in first place 

Please look up 'CSI' here: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Major_drivers
 
If you look at the status matrix above you see 'WIP' which translates to 'Wait in progress'. No one from community is actively working on the CSI framework and the money Nextthing spent on hiring Free Electrons is obviously not that much to get things done (understandable, they made a design choice to not use eMMC on the CHIP but use raw NAND instead which needed huge development efforts to get it somehow stable in order to save maybe less than $0.5 per device for the onboard storage).
 
If you're currently searching around to do anything useful with cameras and Allwinner SoCs Armbian forum is the place to be since some kind souls started to look into various drivers and joined development/testing efforts here.
 
BTW: we also use SBC at various customers (some of them even replacing 40TB NAS boxes due to 'work smarter not harder' approach) so if you know what you're doing and are able to deal with the software side yourself -- or hire someone, Open Source eases that a lot -- those little beast can do a great job.