I just had one of these delivered. I bought it to tinker with and to get a proper look at Android. It's a 7" Android tablet running version 2.3. For £129. I can't actually find anything 'wrong' with it to justify the price being so low. It seems speedy enough (not slick but it never seems to leave you waiting long enough to be irritating), the capacitive screen is pretty responsive, it's running 'full' 2.3 with access to the marketplace & etc. It connected to my wifi fine. The only downers are it has no internal storage to speak of (although you can get a 16GB miroSD card for like a tenner now) and it doesn't seem to have GPS.

It's £129. OK, objectively it's not as good as even my iPad 1, but it's a third of the price. I'm pretty impressed.

Jon

The only "damper" on the experience is the fact that it is running 2.3 - the "smartphone" version of Android, not 3.2, the "tablet" version of Android. Hopefully it will get an update to 4.0, which is the rejoining of the fork, combining the smartphone and the tablet orientated versions.

That would require Google to actually be as 'open' with 3.x or 4.x as their marketing says they are, or whichever Chinese company actually makes it to sign up as a full google licensee. I'm not holding my breath for either.

I'll have a mooch around the various forums at some point, see if anyone has a hacked build. But given I'm using it partly to improve my ability to support android phones at work and most of the phones you can actually buy right now are still running Android 2.X anyway, I have no immediate desire to get 3.0/4.0 on it just yet to be honest.

Jon

From my understanding, can't you just put the latest Android on it? Isn't that one of the great boons of Android?

You would think that, but no. Despite all the 'open' hoohah, as of last I checked, Google still hadn't released the source code for Android 3.0 'Honycomb' which was released in March I think, despite various licensing issues with 3rd party code that requires them to release the source code in 'a timely manner'. A number of open source advocates have expressed their displeasure about this. Android 4.0 'ice cream sandwich' was unveiled last week and they claim they'll be better at releasing the code this time round, but as I say I'm not holding my breath.

Even then, you may not actually be able to get the latest version to work on your hardware because while Google 'owns' most of Android, it's up to the hardware manufacturers to write and release various hardware drivers that may be needed for a particular device. So even if you have the Google source code, if the people who made your phone/tablet haven't released the drivers for your device, you're going to struggle. The only devices that are guaranteed to work purely with Google's own code are Google's own 'nexus' range of phones.

Put short, Android is more open than iOS but not as open as some of it's more vehement advocates claim it to be. You used to be able to download the google source code, compile it and transfer it across to your phone but these days the situation is much more complex.

Bit of an update on the tablet - it's holding up well, although the battery life doesn't look like anything to shout about. Also despite being of metal rather than plastic construction the build quality is a bit flimsy - you can cause 'bumps' on the screen by pressing hard against the back. And the automatic portrait/landscape auto orientation is a bit.. enthusiastic. If you switch that off it defaults to landscape, but then I don't see how to manually switch it to portrait. Any of you android experts know how?

It is a bit of a cheap device, but taken on it's merits as being so, it's a pretty good basic tablet/media player.

Jon

I was wondering.

My main problem with tablets at this end of the market is that they're a lower spec than my phone, and thus rather pointless for me.

My main requirements for a tablet would be a decent screen resolution (not 480x800 like my phone) and a decent battery life (not 3 hours like my phone).

However, if I didn't have or want a smart phone then I might be very tempted by something like this. I need to get something for my Mum to read e-books, but the Kindle is still a more likely bet at the moment because she has no interwebs.

I've used a kindle 3 quite a lot - my father has one - and I'd say it's a better ebook reader than this is, as well as being slightly cheaper. This is obviously much, much more flexible though. However if you don't need that flexibility...

Plus I have a feeling '800X480' and 'about three hours use' are pretty much on spec for this thing.

Jon

The source code for 3 will never be released. It was a rush job and Google were unhappy with the quality and Don't want it open sources. The code for 4.0 has already been released, allegedly.

I think, Google should have stuck with the open source paradigm and opened 3 regardless. It has brought them a lot of bad press and they have lost some fans through the action, and just at a time the phone version was taking off and overtook iOS...

At the moment this is true purely on cost. You simply can't make something better in this price bracket.

My dream tablet would have a battery that lasted for at least 16 hours intense usage and preferably a whole month or more of lite usage (like the kindle) but with a full colour full HD display.

That's a dream at any price bracket today, but progress is always marching on...

Though as ever, the majority could give a flying duck...

n't