The Evolio Aria tablet was a pretty good budget device, that we tested last year and now it’s time for the Evolio Aria Mini to get tested by us. This is a $226 slate with an 8 inch display and Android Jelly Bean on board. The device was launched in February and it will also have a 3G version, a bit more expensive.
We have tested two Romanian slates with 8 inch displays this year: the E-Boda X80 and the Allview TX1 Quasar and now it’s time for the third slate offered by Romanian company Evolio. The gadget comes with an 8 GB bundled card and an EvoBook gift card, for downloading e-books. The Evolio Aria Mini comes with 5 years of warranty and the design involves plastic, not metal, unlike the other 8 inch slates mentioned before.
Plastic isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the device has a good grip and it’s also not easy to scratch. I must also mention that the lower back side of the device will get hotter with prolonged use, especially when you play Real Racing 3 on it. As usual with such budget slates, all the major ports and slots are on one side.
Evolio Aria Mini measures 9.5 mm in thickness, weighs 450 grams and it’s a pretty bulky device overall. The bad thing is that when you press the volume buttons, the case seems to wiggle a bit. Although I said that the slate is all plastic, there’s a metal frame around the screen, for an extra bit of resilience. As far as hardware is concerned, the tablet comes with a Rockchip RK3066 dual core 1.5 GHz processor, an 8 inch IPS display with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels and a 4:3 aspect ratio.
The specs also include a 2 megapixel camera at the back and a front 0.3 MP shooter, as well as 8 GB of internal memory, 1 GB of RAM and a microSD card slot with support for up to 32 GB. We’ve got Bluetooth, WiFi, mini HDMI, microUSB and GPS, as well as a 4500 mAh battery, that should provide about 4-5 hours of functioning time.
Aria Mini runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and thanks to that OS, we get all the goodies of Project Butter. The device also has an optional DVR kit accessory that allows the user to record his travels by car. Moving further, the virtual keyboard of the slate is comfortable and the browser is reasonably fast. As far as multimedia goes, the audio quality may be good and the speakers are quite decent.
However, the back side of the product vibrates when you turn up the volume. We’re dealing with good bass here and a 0.5 W speaker incorporated into the slate. As far as video goes, sadly the view angles are not that good, but the brightness is high and colors are vivid. The tablet supports Full HD playback, MKV files work without hassle and as far as the camera goes, it’s neglectable. The only thing I liked about it was its speed.
We also benchmarked this model and compared it to the other 2012-2013 8 inch Romanian tablets: Allview TX1 Quasar and E-Boda X80. The benchmarks were actually pretty good, so in Quadrant we scored 4426 points, close to the E-Boda X80’s 4818 points, while Allview TX1 scored 2600 points. In AnTuTu we got 11.300 points with the Evolio Aria Mini, while the E-Boda X80 reached 11.800 and the Allview unit 5800 points. In NenaMark 2 we scored 59.3 FPS, thanks to a powerful GPU and we clearly beat the 49 FPS on the E-Boda model and the 15 FPS on the Allview unit.
In Vellamo we got 1649 points, beating the 800 points of the E-Boda unit and the 1012 of the Allview. The Evolio Aria Mini battery charges in about 2 hours and a half, that’s a pretty long charging time in my book. Bundled apps here include Kingsoft Office for productivity, Mireo GPS (you have to pay for full features), See Now for media viewing and EvoBook, serving as both an e-book store and e-reader.
And now it’s time for the Pros and Cons related to the unit. Here are the Pros:
- 5 years of warranty
- Jelly Bean
- low price
- good GPU and benchmarks
- decent audio quality
- screen brightness
And the Cons:
- the back case gets overheated
- bulky design
- vibrating back at maximum audio volume
- weak viewing angles
- long time for battery charge
The slate gets an 8 out of 10 for design, a 9 for hardware and 10 for Jelly Bean and bundled apps. The final grade is 9 out of 10, which is very good for a budget slate from Eastern Europe.
