RCA Voyager II 7" Tablet Review (Android)

Just when you think you've found a good deal for a tablet under $100, this happens.

Most people know the RCA voyager series from black Friday, when it's on sale for $30. Most people who buy it, do so as a gift, and don't care if it's any good or not. I bought one as a gift before I even reviewed the thing myself. When I finally did buy one for a review at a local WalMart, it was fucking dead on arrival. The battery wouldn't take a charge, and it boot looped when trying to boot it plugged in. I take it back to Wal-Mart the next day, and the electronics rep tells me that the product had a fail rate of 5%, which was a manager's way of saying that people kept returning this particular product quite a bit. I exchange it for a new one, but as you can clearly see, things are not looking good.

Hardware

I'm going to get the obvious out of the way, which is that this tablet is not manufactured by RCA at all. This is an Alco brand RCT6773W22B tablet from Hong Kong, rebranded to look like it was an RCA original. Private label electronics are not at all uncommon in the world of Android tablets and smartphones, though a part of me wishes it was an American company that actually built this thing. It would likely have had a positive effect on the quality.

That being said, On the technical side of things, The RCA voyager II wipes the floor with every other tablet at this price range. This device sports a quad core MediaTek MT8127 Processor at 1.4GHz, and unlike the Digiland tablet we previously reviewed, this tablet sports a full 1GB of RAM, as apposed to just having half that. Also, unlike the first version of the Voyager Tablet from 2014, this one supports Bluetooth. The screen is your average 1024x600 resolution, which, at this price range is perfect. Alco has also taken steps to reduce the screen glare, with a slightly more consistent color and image quality when tilting the screen in any direction.There is a version of this tablet that supports a 16GB internal storage, but we are reviewing the 8GB version.

Software

I can hail the RCA voyager as the king of all $50 Android tablets all day; it won't mean shit if its held back by bad software, which, unfortunately, is exactly what happened here. The internal storage is only 8gb in total, the system partition takes up almost 4GB, and the bloatware and Google apps occupy almost 1.3gb, leaving you with a little over a GB of space. Now you're probably thinking: "no worries, I'll just move the apps to the SD card..." but, for whatever reason, this build of Android doesn't allow it. As a matter of fact, It doesn't even have an app2SD function at all.

Now, as I understand it, Android is designed and developed around Google's Nexus devices. Nexus devices represent the blueprint for what a tablet or smartphone should be, according to Google. Nexus devices running lollipop have adoptable storage, meaning that Alco deliberately removed the App2SD function from their build of Android on purpose. This build is so bad, you can't even save files directly to an SD card. There is just... There are no words to describe how retarded and ass backwards this decision was. What in the celestial fuck is the point of even having an SD card slot if it isn't going to let you write files and data to it?

Normally, to get around this limitation, one would root their tablet in order to move their files and apps to the SD card properly, but for the RCA Voyager II, information on exactly how to do it doesn't exist anywhere at this point.

Verdict:

Over all, this is a good piece of hardware for $50, barred from greatness by its arbitrary software limitations and bloatware. As soon as someone comes up with a way to root this thing, this would be the best deal on any android device.