If I told you that there’s a tablet out there priced at $130 and running Jelly Bean, I think you’d become interested in that device. Well that device is the Allview Speed City, a tablet from Romania that we tested recently. This model is a 7 inch slate that was launched in November and it packs a dual core CPU. You can check out the slate’s design below:
The Speed City weighs 327 grams, measures 9.7 mm in thickness and it’s a compact machine. It sits well in the user’s hand and comes with an assortment of ports and slots like HDMI, microUSB and microSD. The device has an aluminum case and gives a feeling of solidity and safety. As far as hardware goes, the tablet offers a TFT LCD display, a capacitive multitouch screen with a 7 inch diagonal and 800 x 480 pixel resolution. The same screen has a 16:9 aspect ratio and as far as the OS goes, Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean is the name of the game.
The specs of the tablet also include a dual core Cortex A9 processor at 1.5 GHz, a Mali 400 MP2 GPU and 8 GB of flash memory. 1 GB of DDR3 RAM is also here, plus a microSD card slot, with support for up to 32 GB of extra storage. The tablet is available in black or white and it supports WiFi, plus 3G via a dongle attached to the device. Allview Speed City also integrates a 0.3 megapixel front camera, offers stereo sound and Full HD playback. As far as the battery goes, we’ve got a Li-Polymer unit, with 3200 mAh capacity. On paper this battery offers 4 hours of functioning time and 250 hours of standby.
In real life, we got to 6 hours of functioning time, of which one hour was video playback, 2 hours were gaming, 2 were audio playback and one was web browsing. The charging of the battery to 100% takes about 2 hours and a half or maybe 3. On the audio side we must mention that there are no physical volume buttons on the slate, only virtual ones. The volume and quality of the sound on the Speed City are good, but if you’re listening to a song with guitar, this instrument doesn’t sound quite right on the slate. Also, the back of the device vibrates at maximum level.
On the video playback side, we used a GTA V trailer and uncovered some vivid colors, but also some problems, like the glossy screen and weak viewing angles. The device is also not that bright, or rather I could say that the difference between the lowest brightness setting and the highest is too small. Well, at least it supports 1080p video playback… As far as benchmarking is concerned, we tested this device against some other 7 inch models like the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and even the Nexus 7. We know those are good devices, but they cost double the price of the device and we were curios to compare them.
In Quadrant Allview Speed City scored 4079 points, more than the 2965 of the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and the 3656 of the Nexus 7. In AnTuTu we also got a good score: 10.584, above 5366 points, the score of the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and pretty close to the 10.950 points of the Nexus 7. In Vellamo we scored 1219 points, past the 1000 points of the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0, but below the 1733 points of the Nexus 7. Browsermark gave us a score of 615, probably the lowest I’ve seen over the past year, so web browsing is not exactly premium here.
At least we’ve got a responsive and comfy virtual keyboard, decent multitasking and an interface that doesn’t lag. The slate has preinstalled Bitdefender Mobile Security for antitheft and anti malware features and it also bundles a bunch of apps like an APK installer, PDF viewer, Office Suite and Notes. We also demoed regular apps like Gmail, Google Maps and Twitter on the device and they worked just fine. Even Dead Trigger got a spin from us on this Jelly Bean slate and it behaved admirably.
And now it’s time to decide what the pros and cons of the this product are. Here are the pros:
- very good price
- sturdy case
- user friendly tablet format
- decent audio
- OK battery
- no lag, modern games work on it
And the cons:
- viewing angles suck
- no volume buttons
- the Home button is placed awkardly
- brightness could be better
- screen resolution is low
We give this tablet an 8 for design, 7 for hardware and 9 for OS and UI, for a total of 8 out of 10. It’s a pretty nice buy, if you have $130 to spend and you’re in the Eastern Europe looking for a slate.
