And here we are with yet another tablet under the Romanian brand Allview. Their products are made in China and branded in Romania and this time we’re dealing with the Alldro 2 Speed HD slate, that resembles the iPad a little bit. The product is priced at around $200 and it’s available in black and white. Now let’s see what it can do!
So, we have the iPad resemblance to notice first and as far as design goes, this 8 inch slate is almost a square, which is unusual considering today’s trend of launching rectangular devices. This slate also comes with a HDMI port, mini USB port, microSD card slot and a screen orientation lock button, as well as physical volume and On/OFF buttons. As usual on Romanian Allview tablets, all the main ports and slots are on one side of the device. At the back we find stereo speakers and a 2 megapixel camera with no flash.
The slate has a matte back area, with good grip and moving at the front, this is where we find the screen, that’s not that bright, even with the brightness settings all the way up. If you want measurements, the product is 9.9 mm thick, weighs 498 grams and has too big bezels around the display, that is not too eye pleasing. Its 8 inch screen supports a 1024 x 768 pixel resolution, putting the “HD” particle in the tablet’s name. The same screen works at a 4:3 aspect ratio and the first defect I found was the fact that the Home button was too well embedded into the device, as shown in the video review.
Other details of the Allview Alldro 2 Speed HD include its Cortex A8 1.2 GHz CPU, that helps it run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. For some reason we also get on screen virtual volume buttons, although physical ones are also present. Other features include the famous Mali 400 MP GPU (4 core), 8 GB of storage and 1 GB of DDR3 RAM. The Alldro 2 Speed HD has to offer a microSD card slot, WiFi and 3G connectivity, but the latter only by connecting a dongle with a mini USB cable.
Aside from the back 2 megapixel camera, we’ve got a 0.3 megapixel camera at the front. The stereo speakers do a fine job and their volume is OK, but they make the back of the slate vibrate, a problem I also found on more expensive slates, like the Motorola Xoom 2. The tablet is friendly when it comes to playing back most formats, like MP3, WMA, WAV, FLAC, AVI, MOV, MPEG and MKV. As far as power goes, we’ve got a 4400 mAh battery on board, that provides 5.7 hours of functioning time.
This model is bundled with Bitdefender Mobile Security Premium, in the trial 90 days version. The famous Romanian antivirus offers you the option to scan the slate for viruses, an antitheft option and more. The tablet doesn’t have a GPS, so it relies on the WiFi localization. As far as benchmarks go, we scored 2288 points in Quadrant, pretty close to the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, that scored 2600 points. We also surpassed the famous Motorola Xoom 2 8.2, that only scores 1663 points.
In AnTuTu we scored 2775 points, half of the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 score and close to the Xoom 2, with 2862 points. In NenaMark 2 the GPU helped the slate score 22.2 FPS, surpassing the Xoom 2 with 19 FPS. An interesting feature to notice on this device is that the keyboard is also adapted to thumb typing, so not only the design is borrowed from the iPad, but also the keyboard. The web browser is decent at best, although it may lag when pinching to zoom. As far as audio goes, the volume and clarity are OK, but not the case vibrations.
The lack of a camera flash, some lag problems and lack of more storage make this device a bit more unappealing. At least we get a HDMI port, Android 4.0 ICS, Google Play Store access and a pretty low prices, as pro aspects of the device. We give the Allview Alldro 2 Speed HD a 6 out of 10 and for more about it you have the video review below.
