Exorbitantly Priced!

Will tab users lap up a tab despite an extremely high price tag?

The recently launched Huawei Mediapad tablet by the Chinese company, at its first look, gives an impression of a sophisticated portable 7-inch tablet, running on Android 3.2 Honeycomb OS. With a thickness of just 11 mm, it’s thinner than many other tablets currently available in the market.

Design and Structure

The tablet has an aluminum unibody design and the back of the device has 2 triangular cut-outs made of a soft rubberized material. The volume and power buttons are too constructed from metal, and the lower cut-out can be removed to reveal slots for the microsd and the SIM cards. On top there’s a 3.5 mm headphone jack and twin speakers, while at the bottom of the tab there are micro-hdmi and micro-usb sockets, as well as a microsd slot for memory expansion.

One needs to purchase an HDMI cable in order to output videos from the tab.

The device under its hood generates power from Qualcomm’s 1.2 GHZ dual core processor with 1 GB of RAM. The Honeycomb OS gives a pleasant feel to the user, but the sluggish performance while performing a task disappoints, which is not the case with the Galaxy Tab and ipad.

The tab clicks fair quality pictures with its 5-MP camera at the rear, and the front-facing 1.3-MP did its job well while video chatting.

Testing

The tab was tested on the following parameters:

Video Playback: The HD 720P videos played with ease on the tablet and the resolution managed to leave an impression, though the crisp screen resolution of the tab was not able to beat the Super AMO- LED Plus display of the Galaxy (7.7). Huawei claims that the tab has support for full 1080P video playback.

Sound System: The most impressive feature of the tablet is its super loud sound from the speakers mounted on top of the tab, with SRS audio enhancement software; this device truly gives a cinematic experience while watching a movie.

Touch Sensitivity: The touch sensitivity of the tablet disappoints, and sometimes it takes 2 or 3 finger attempts to scroll down a page or to open an application.

Connectivity: On the connectivity front, the 7-inch tab offers HSDPA 14.4 Mbps speed, while the uploading speed reaches 5.76 Mbps, as claimed by the company. The device also offers GPRS, EDGE, Wi-fi 802.11, with Wi-fi hotspot facility and bluetooth 2.1.

Portability: The 7-inch size and a mere 400 grams weight of the device offers portability, without compromising with its performance over other 10.1 inch devices which comparitively are bulky to carry.

Memory: The 8 GB internal memory of the tab is expandable up to 32 GB and is preloaded with apps like Angry Birds, Asphalt 6, and Let’s Golf.

Longevity: The tab offered about 6 hours of video playback on full brightness, which is impressive. And, when fully recharged, the tab stood for about 100 hours, which seems fair enough.

Drawbacks

The major drawback of the tablet are:

Pricing: The price tag of 28,539 makes a buyer think several times before

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picking the device, as there are many other options available at a lower price for a general tablet user.

Other: Moreover, the features that come packed with the tab do not seem worthy enough for such a price, the slothful performance of the device and the unresponsive touchscreen contributes to the disappointment in a major way.

Undoubtedly, the device is packed with some good features like the amazing sound and a brilliant resolution, but still they don’t justify it being priced at such an amount. With a little more monetary effort, one can get a Samsung Galaxy Tab or an ipad, which are possessed with more fascinating features compared to this machine.

rimits@cybermedia.co.in