Its almost incredible how popular and widespread this tablet is these days. It seems like every electronics retailer in North America is selling this tablet in some capacity, yet, even with the $50 price tag, it seems like no one really cares about it. Maybe an in-depth review will reveal what the hell is going on.
Design:
This tablet sports a very ambiguous form factor, almost indistinguishable from most other tablets on the market, and it looks pretty good, all things considered. unfortunately, like most tablets on the market, it's designed to be about as easy to grip as a bar of soap in a bathtub. There is no grip of any kind on this thing, making it a colossal pain in the ass to operate without the fear of dropping it.
Another issue I have is with the placement of the buttons. They're on the same side as the USB port and the headphone jack, and are positioned in such a way to where playing certain games makes you accidentally hit the volume rocker, or turn the screen off.
Screen:
The screen sports a 1024 by 600 pixel resolution, and a 7" screen, which sucks balls when viewing anything from any angle. Most tablets and smart phones have displays that prevent weird color distortions from happening when viewing stuff at an angle, and this screen is still stuck in the 90s, with its awful screen glare.
What I found to be a bit surprising is that this tablet comes with its own screen protector, deceptively fused to the Gerilla Glass, and you will only ever find out that it exists if you carefully peel it off of one of the tablet's edges with a very thin -very sharp- razor. The Screen protector itself it terrible, and scratches like the thin, shitty piece of plastic that it is. You're better off buying a third party screen protector for this model.
The most disappointing part about the tablet by far, is the inaccurate, un-smooth, and jerky touch sensor under the glass, which defeats the whole point of having a high-resolution display. The box it comes with proudly advertises an 5-point capacitive touch sensor, but the circumference of the sensor blocks underneath the glass doesn't even come close to matching the pixel resolution of the LCD screen. This leaves you with a jumpy, frustrating experience when playing first-person shooters, or using painting and drawing apps like Corel Painter and Autodesk Sketchbook. It may be very responsive to touch input, but it is a terrible device in terms of smoothness and accuracy when using it.
Hardware:
The tablet sports a Quad-Core 1.3GHZ Mediatek (Cortex-A7) processor, which is one of the biggest selling points of the device. Unlike the Qualcomm Snapdragon processors you usually find in most Android devices, Mediatek sacrifices battery life for performance, and it really shows with this tablet. The tablet can stay running for a full 9 hours on a single charge when doing nothing, but will cut the battery life in half when playing games.
One of the big downsides of this tablet is that it only has 512MB of ram built in. This would seem like a fair trade-off, considering the tablet is only $40, but you could buy an RCA tablet with the same specs, and 1GB of RAM for the exact same price.
The problem with having only 512MB of RAM in the tablet is the fact that most of the games keep crashing left and right. In fact, the longer this device is used, the more likely it will crash when running RAM-intensive apps, and these apps crash A LOT. Some 3D games don't even get past the intro screen.This can be fixed somewhat by rooting the tablet and modifying the Dalvik cache, but the stock Kernel the tablet come with accounts for a large portion of the tablet's instability, which I will discuss later on in the review.
This tablet comes with built-in Bluetooth 3.0 and 802.11n support, GPS, and a 2MP back-facing camera, all of which is a step up from the previous version of DigiLand's 7 inch tablet from 2013, yet manages to remain the same price. The two cameras on the front and back suck, with blurry image quality and god-awful frame rates that look less like video and more like PowerPoint presentations, but at a $40 price point, who cares?
Software:
This tablet comes with Android 4.4.4 KitKat, and could potentially be upgraded to 5, which is pretty damn cool. The quad-core Mediatek CPU makes this OS run silky smooth, even with the lack of RAM available to most of the apps.
This tablet, unlike many a discount off-brand tablets out there, (*CaughPolaroidCaugh*) comes with the Google Play store and Google apps pre-installed. You don't have to go to Xda-developers.com and look for a tutorial on how to hack them in. This is a big relief.
The big downside of this tablet's software really lies in the stock Kernel, as it doesn't seem to be designed for any tablets with only 512MB or RAM. It has a lot of trouble keeping intensive apps open, and doesn't seem to manage memory well. There are ways around this, such as installing a custom Kernel, but the fact that DigiLand didn't add a more stable version out of the box is pretty disappointing
All things considered, this is a pretty good deal if you're a nerd looking to hack a tablet, but the average user will have trouble adjusting to the crappy stock Kernel and the bad hardware choices. This is by no means a bad device, but you could find a better deal for $40 elsewhere.
The good: Very fast, Android 4.4, Quad Core,
The Bad: Not much RAM, bad Touch screen, Games crash too much...
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