My beloved Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone is showing its age. Not that it failed on any hardware part, but the Symbian OS now seems and feels unbearably old.
However, what it used to achieve with its puny 450ish MHz clock and some 128MB of RAM and 81MB of internal memory was very good.
So, I was thinking about having a go at Android, but latter thought, why not try the latest trend : Tablet!
It seemed perfectly good option for trying new software platform and also to try never before tried form factor. That was the point when seriously started thinking about buying the tablet.
Note that tablet is not phone. Portability of your phone is unbeatable. Having feature rich phone is much much more useful than tablet. You can use your phone to capture moments, as mp3 player, for taking notes(your purchases, text notes, your card numbers etc), for navigation, for communication(voice call, data call, sms, bluetooth file transfer, chat), as browser, to check mails, alarm clock etc. Tablet can have these functions too, but the fact that its not portable and its not with you always makes many of these functions unusable. On the other hand watching videos, reading books is much more enjoyable on tablet. Playing games too is much more pleasing on tablet. So having immensely tablet was not my priority and in general I think that its not required. Having cutting edge phone is much more productive than having cutting edge tablet. However, tablet can perform some functions of laptop and hence for some people stuff like checking mails, browsing, 3g connectivity might be important while considering the tablet. But still I feel that other uses that I mentioned first are not possible with form factor of the tablet.
Now, being in India, there were very few branded options. Apple Ipad, Asus transformer are out of reach because of their price. Google nexus 7 and Samsung tab appeared good options, but nexus 7 was still not available. Also nexus has serious limitation of non expandable memory and quiet frankly I was unhappy with the fact that Asus would launch it in India in June 2013, mostly because newer version of nexus would appear in the west :x
Coming to Samsung, it was a good choice too. The lowest Samsung tab was priced for around 13000 INR which was very aggressive pricing.
But when I tried 7inch tabs, I was overwhelmingly disappointed(This is another time when I really appreciate Apple for introducing 8inch size, Apple designers proved their excellence yet again).
I do not understand why 16:9 aspect ratio was selected for tablets. This ratio makes PDF, web pages reading extremely uncomfortable.
Imagine rotating your monitor vertically. Agreed, that we read PDF on monitor quiet comfortably, but somehow, on tablet it looks really small. If you try to read it in landscape mode, there are too few lines on screen and you will need to scroll frequently, while in portrait mode, you cannot fit the page by width as it becomes too small to read.
8 inch is perfect size for reading here, in landscape mode there would be enough lines to read before you scroll and in portrait mode you can fit entire page and still read it!
I decided to buy tablet mainly for making my travelling time more productive. Read PDFs and other ebooks, watch movies/videos, play puzzle games 3G connectivity was not a priority for me. Another potential use was to use it for playing MP3/FLAC to my dedicated speakers and if all else fails then use it as photo frame! 8 inch is a perfect size to do all these things.
As a start, chinese tabs appeared very good option. I was not sure about the usefulness of tablet as I prefer my laptop for any meaningful work and I dont need to work while travelling as such. So tablet was more or less redundant for me, hence was ready for calculated compromise.
Chinese tablets looked like godsend alternative. It was cheap, it was value for money, quality was acceptable, it could be ordered online and it had good combination of required features!
So that's how I finally ordered my Teclast P88 tablet.
A quick look at the features -
Excellent IPS screen with good resolution
Very thin at just 9.6mm(same as Samsung galaxy S3), 8 inch size with narrow bezel, White color
Rockchip 3066 dual core CPU clocked at 1.6Ghz
Mali-400 GPU
1GB of RAM
16GB of internal memory
10600 AnTuTu score. Many latest android phones/tablets struggle in 6-8 range of AnTuTu score and cost 15-20k INR. So this score by this tablet is AMAZING.
Only setbacks are - has dodgy wifi in my case for old dlink router(this is mostly routers fault, but not able to verify independently), but many others say that wifi is excellent; and poor camera, I have not used this camera except for initial testing, its THAT bad; and not to forget crappy accelerometer, orientation change is piece of cake but accelerometer has too much noise and it does not stay at constant value which makes playing accelerometer games imprecise and boring, may be it firmware, may be its hardware, I dont know at this point of time.
Next I would talk about my step by step feature consideration and final purchase. So fasten your seat belts and enjoy the blabber.
