Onda OBook 10 SE............
If Android and desktop Linux had an offspring Desire Athow thinks it’d be as scary as ordering hardware from China.
Us? Buy hardware from a Chinese retailer? Never, but that sounds like the sort of postBrexit world we live in now. The interesting part is Remix OS that comes with it.
Early in 2016, a little known startup, Jide, announced that it was releasing a new OS based on the Android-x86 project which ported the ttAOSP (Android Open Source Project) to the x86 platform (Intel and AMD). Jide is backed by Foxconn, one of the biggest technology manufacturers in the world, and was founded by ex-Google employees.
The project usually lags behind its ARM-based counterpart by a few months but the thriving community means that with a regular release cycle, Remix OS is shaping up to be a nice little rival for Google’s own Chrome OS.
Remix OS looks a lot like desktop Linux, with a very familiar appearance and feel. There’s a file manager, a menu button and a taskbar, plus a number of improvements over Android such as better multitasking and windowing.
However, Remix OS is only available outside of the UK via China, the Onda OBook 10 SE tablet runs Remix OS 2.0 that’s based on Android 5.1 Lollipop, a Marshmallow update (Android 6.0) should be available soon. The OBook is a reasonably well-designed tablet that suffers from one major flaw—it doesn’t have a rear camera.
This device looks and feels like a traditional 10.1-inch Windows tablet without the dedicated Windows key. There’s even an optional keyboard (despite most images showing the keyboard, it’s an extra), which costs an further £39, bringing the total price of the combination to about £150 depending on the latest exchange rate fall.
The tablet adopts a flashy gold champagne colour scheme with a reasonably small bezel, a full HD webcam, a 10.1-inch glass-covered 1280x800 pixel display and a lonely circular capacitive Home button at the front. On the sides are connectors for the keyboard dock, a microSD (TF) card slot, audio connector, microUSB, microHDMI, a DC power socket, the power button, volume rocker buttons and a speaker grill.
Old and frail
Overall, it’s a well-built tablet although the hardware inside is a bit long in the tooth. There’s an Intel Atom Z3735F (from January 2014), 2GB of RAM, 32GB onboard storage, a 5,400mAh battery, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
As for the overall experience of Remix OS, it felt natural and comes with additional apps some of which support windowing, but none of the ones from Google Play do. You are likely to encounter issues with some Android apps which might not support Remix OS. A quick test using Antutu showed that the Z3735F ranked behind the original OnePlus One smartphone with a score of 52,665. But at no time during our testing did we experience lagging or freezing, even given the low amount of memory and the old processor.
It’s hard to recommend the tablet itself as it’s expensive, based on old technology and has unproven support—a quick read of online comments leaves us with mixed feelings about the level of support you receive. As for our first encounter with Remix OS, it went well—it’s Android but done differently. It’s finding its way into a rising number of devices so expect to see much more of it in the future.