Of all the Chinese and “White Box” products, I am facing now a “more polished” one. Here, at my desk, I am seeing a good quality and affordable tablet.
What am I talking about? Well, it’s the Yarvik tablet that made me change my mind regarding smaller brands products. Until now, most of them were unpolished (literally) and preloaded with phone operating systems like Gingerbread, or worse: Froyo. But this Tab has Android 4.0 by default and it performs very well. Plus that it has an IPS screen, so this makes a perfect affordable tablet.
Hardware
Built around an Aluminum backside, with a plastic bezel, the tablet feels pretty robust and the metal fells premium, there are plenty “premium priced” tablets made from plastic. The screen is glass, scratch resistant, with a resolution of 1024×768 pixels, 4:3 format. The format is 9.7” like other brands (HP Touchpad for example) and is nice for using in portrait or landscape.
Opening the box, we reveal the tablet (of course) and there are also the accessories: a charger (proprietary – can also charge by USB, but slowly), a OTG cable and a microUSB data transfer cable. And of course, a user guide.
The tablet is built with processor made by BoxChip Cortex A8, with Mali400GPU (yes, the one from SGS II and other products), clocked at 1.2GHz. Memory is 1GB RAM and storage is 8GB. Of course, you can extend it up to 40GB with an external microSD card.
The screen is Super IPS (but not Plus like TF Prime), bright enough in daylight and has 178 degrees viewing angle. Resolution is 1024×768 pixels, very good for reading in portrait mode, also browsing the Internet is also pleasant in portrait mode.
The tablet has two microUSB ports, one Host, one slave, this is very nice, you can connect a variety of dongles and keyboards, etc. Also there’s a microHDMI port present and a microSD slot.
Sideways, there are volume buttons and power on/sleep buttons. Interesting enough, the volume buttons also act as home and back soft touch buttons.
Sound is good, there’s only one speaker, but loud enough to hear music or movie/games sound.
Software
Tab467EUK comes preloaded with Android 4.0 which is very nice, I am tired of old phone operating systems. It performs as it should, lag is present, but at minor level. The Launcher is pretty basic, but GPU accelerated so it has almost no lag and performs smoothly.
It has everything that 4.0 Android offers, besides the Play Store, and this is what puzzles me. Perhaps because of the free SDK which is available and a partnership with greedy Google is costly. Nevertheless, there’s an another way to put Play store, but I am not detailing how, because of obvious reasons.
Games perform well, of course, not Tegra ones, I found out that Tegra optimized perform less pleasant on Mali400, but almost every other 3D game is running well. Tried HD games like Sentinel, Sparkle and Shadowgun. (this one has a bit of frame drops, but is playable, it’s aTegra game).
Watching movies? Of course, throw every codec you want at Mali400 and it will play effortlessly, it helps a lot having that NEON extension.
Conclusion
In this short hands-on I wanted only to show that there are a lot of good tablets on the market and also affordable and good spec’d.
This tablet costs about 250Euros in Euro land, so it makes a budget friendly tablet. It’s about half the price of a bigger brand product, but not so weak compared by today’s standards.
