If you follow us regularly you probably know that we test a lot of budget tablets, most of them belonging to East European brands like Evolio or Allview. Now, there’s the occasional such model that really makes a positive impression on us. Such is the case of the Evolio Aria, a tablet that was launched in August and hit the stores in September. It’s priced at 220 euros and it’s probably even cheaper now.
The appealing part here, among others is the 5 years of warranty you get with this product. The tablet’s design involves good quality materials and the result is a slate that’s 9.9 mm thick, uses an aluminum chassis and weighs 570 grams. The device has a microUSB port, a pretty hard to press On/OFF button and a bit of a problem with backlight bleeding. Its specs include an ARM Amlogic 8726 MX CPU, which is a dual core 1.5 GHz chipset with a Mali 400 GPU in the mix.
Other features include a 2 megapixel back camera and a 0.3 megapixel front one. The display here is a 9.7 inch IPS one, with a 1024 x 768 resolution and pretty good viewing angles. Evolio Aria has 1 GB of DDR3 RAM, 16 GB of iNAND flash storage, WiFi, 3G dongle support and a 1W speaker. Its battery is able to offer 5-6 hours of functioning time with a 2 hour and a half charge. The device supports quad full HD playback via HDMI (2160p) and it also has infrared. It plays MKV files, FLAC too and supports PDFs.
On the audio side we get a very good volume and decent bass, while on the video side things are pretty bright, viewing angles are decent and colors are vivid. The camera is actually not worth mentioning, as usual for such budget slates and their cameras. Testing the performance gave us some pretty good benchmarks, like 3819 points in Quadrant, 7511 in AnTuTu or 36.5 FPS in NenaMark 2. The virtual keyboard of the slate is pretty comfortable to use, the web browser is fast and for some reason we had Google Earth preinstalled on the device, working decently.
Aria runs Android 4.0.3 without lag, Google Maps works fine on it and so do Google+ and Facebook. So, when the verdict is in we find a product with such nice hardware that we give it a 9.5 out of 10 for hardware, 8.5 for design, 9 for OS and UI, for a total of 9 out of 10. This is one of the few Evolio/Allview slates I’d really buy, but more of that in the full review below.
