Buying the tablet - 2

So that was all going through my head, and finally I made my decision. What follows is thorough discussion on how I reached this decision.

I was looking for cheap tablet, but that does not mean that I wanted it as cheap as possible. I wanted something which would work properly and which would offer acceptable compromises.

Display
I already decided screen size and 8 inch was the way to go. But resolution was something which I was not too much concerned with. Now a days, In 5 inch phones its normal to see 1920x1280 or like resolution. Its great to have, but for tablets its not required. P88 has 1024x768 resolution. And believe me, it appears mediocre but its very very good. I dont find any need for higher resolution, but obviously if you are expecting retina display like sharpness, its not the case here(especially for text).
Point to note here is, typical viewing distance of tablet is higher than phone and hence lower resolution has lesser effect. Also it depends upon quality of display. Small text is somewhat ugly, but its not a major issue.

So resolution is something you can let go but IPS panel HAS to be there. I have a laptop which has pathetic viewing angles. Even when screen tilts by 5degrees or you move your head by couple of inches colors follow all shades in shade card and you see never before seen picture :P So I did not want this to happen for tablet. IPS panel has great viewing angles and saturation/contrast change is very minimal. So I would say this is must have feature. Some chinese manufacturers falsely advertise MVA matrix as IPS, so you need to be careful there. In case of P88, it has IPS panel and its viewing angles are excellent. Its also very bright indoors. In fact if you are watching some high quality image and you put it on table, it almost feels like printed image. However, in sunlight screen washes out and its barely readable.

CPU and GPU
Android requires lot of power to run. Even when you forgo OS, its always good to have excellent CPU as applications are going to get CPU hungry day by day and in general their complexity is going to increase; so its very important to have good CPU. P88 has dual core CPU clocked at 1.6Ghz which is extremely good.
Multiple cores are good to have, but in general having quad or octa core does not scale the performance linearly. So dual core was good enough for me. Also higher clock matters if you want good responsivness. So rk3066 offers excellent clock speed too. In some cases, advertised clock rates make the system unstable and consume battery a lot so actual retail versions of the same product has clock rates reduced.

GPU in my opinion is not as important, but games and other functions like HD video playback etc require this, so if you intend to play games then this should be sufficiently good. P88 has Mali-400 GPU which is good if not excellent. Here again, I was ready for compromise but I did not want a slouch either.

Antutu score of 10600 is excellent and Samsung Galaxy tab 2 cannot match these scores for sure. High end android tabs might be able to outperform this but then they cost at least thrice what P88 costs.

Other stuff
Camera was not important for me. But I preferred tablet having front cam, just in case I want to use it for skype call etc. But back camera is redundant in my opinion. You dont carry tablet around like you carry your phone anyway. For serious use, most of the people use real digital camera. So I did not care about the camera much. Though P88 has 3.5mp camera at back, its very poor quality. Front cam is also very dark but with sufficient light you can have video chat if you want.

Charging port is micro USB in case of P88. Its not very useful as you will have to let go the only USB port you have when you charge the tablet, because of this. I would prefer separate charging port. But there are few options in that regard. Also having proprietary connector would create problems in case if charger breaks, so having micro USB is good in that sense.

It has 3.5mm audio out and HDMI out. I have never used HDMI out, and it was not on my priority list. It has micro sd slot upto 32GB which was very important for me.
16GB of internal memory offered is great. I could have chosen the same tablet even if it had 8GB or lesser memory but 16 gigs was more than enough and I did not require any additional memory card because of this, at least initially.

Battery
Now this was other parameter which was deal breaker for me. P88 offers good battery life in my opinion. Having at least 4000mah for 8 inch tablet is important. But remember that battery usage also depends on kind of cpu/gpu you have. Well known cpu/gpu draw are more memory efficient. P88 offers at least 4hrs of video playback which is ok.
Here I did not want cheap battery which would last only couple of hours. I did not want any cheap battery which might explode either. So I feel you should not buy ultra cheap things as battery would be big question mark in that case. So when you choose your tablet, pay attention to ownership reports for battery performance.

Design and build quality is excellent in this case. No squicks at all. No gaps and excellent finish. Bezel is small and if you want you can hold it in one hand over your palm. But its slightly wider than ipad mini, so its not very comfortable to hold that way for me. But it gives you larger bezel than ipad mini, so its easy to hold any orientation with normal grip(like you hold a book)

Now the let downs -
Wifi
I read about many good chinese tablets having poor wifi connectivity. Either those used to offer unstable wifi, where it catches the signal but data speed never picks up and drops to zero then again normal etc; or it does not detect network at all after you are say 50feet away. So pay attention to those details as well. Not having 3g and bluetooth means good wifi is very essential. P88 was not reported to have these issues. But my dlink router somehow seems to have problems with this tablet. Its an old router which does not support N standard, but still other devices work properly with it, so I wonder why only this tablet fails. So I do have unstable wifi with my P88, but I am blaming my router for this. I do get connection but speed often drops and time out errors are common. But this may not be tablet issue.

System stability
This is difficult to verify unless you have the table itself in your hand. IAfter using it for some time, it gave 'unfortunately xxx has stopped' kind of errors. Those would appear for almost all the apps like launcher, gcore etc and I wasnt able to see my home screen. Reboot helps at times but not always
When this happened for the first time, I had to reset my phone, which deleted all the apps and data.
Then I flashed custom firmware 'winter in russia' by ruslankin(big thanks to him) http://www.slatedroid.com/topic/63010-%C2%ABwinter-in-russia%C2%BB/ which had CWM built in. Then I wiped dalvik cache, cache and fixed permissions and that problem went away.

But I have faced this problem quite a few times(at least 5-6 times in last 3 months) but above mentioned solution worked in all the cases. Once when it happened, my entire home screen was reset. This is annoying, especially when you start your tablet and it doesnt work. I dont know the problem for sure, may be its app or corrupt memory or something else, but its fixable so I am happy for now.

Accelerometer
This is very noisy, even when you put your tablet on table, accelorometer output keeps fluctuating. This is big issue for some games and for some apps like google sky map. I hope this could be fixed by firmware updates, but it wasnt fixed in last 2-3 firmware revisions, so I think its hardware issue.

Touchscreen is good in general. But touching small areas like cross to close the tab in browser, or to reload page, or to select piece of text, or to position cursor to correct spelling could be annoying at times. In case of closing tabs, touch wont be registered at all or it might do something else; basically touch at times get sensed at undesired location.
While positioning the cursor, lets say to correct spelling, you require immense accuracy. If you have not zoomed in to sufficiently large size, when you move your finger away from screen(untouch) cursor might move to adjacent character.

So finally, overall I am happy with my purchase of Teclast P88. I bought it from aliexpress for approx $140 in April 2013. If you are not going to use it for work, its an excellent tablet to have. For any serious stuff like work, wifi and stability are question marks. So if you use it carefully(like installing only required apps), it might serve that purpose as well.
I intend to use it for on the go stuff like reading books, watching videos and games. It performs those functions very well.
Teclast has done excellent job and putting cost down and still maintaining quality in all areas is difficult. Teclast would surely improve things as they go ahead.

So thats all about my review cum buying guide and it was a loong post. So I would stop here. But I think that what parameters I considered for buying would be helpful for others and review might help somebody to make the decision. So thats it for now... Happy buying!

Buying the tablet

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.