Simmmtronics XPad X801-- An Ordinary Budget Tablet

We liked Simmtronics XPad X720 for its graphics, 3G support, seamless performance and above all its economical price. While evaluating this Simmtronics tablet, we felt the same vigour missing. Despite some of its attractions like a 2G SIM slot, 3G via dongle, a USB 2.0 slot, an 8-inch/4:3 ratio display, a bigger battery and 8GB internal storage, it failed to qualify as our ideal 8k tablet, something which the lesser priced X720 readily pulled off among 4k tablets.

XPad X801 has a cheap metallic back panel with a shiny yet matte finish, hence smudge free. But the shiny front display is exactly the opposite and so gets smudged a lot. The panel has smooth curved edges, which makes it comfortable to hold, but it can't obscure the fact that it also feels a little heavy. The build quality is good, compact to some extent, and quite sturdy compared to some faintly built 8k tablets like Acer Iconia B1 or Intex iBuddy Connect.

Its display has a decent but regular 800x600p resolution and looks okay. We found the video playback of SD videos all right. The tablet can serve your modest needs very well. You can do your social networking, read and reply back to your mails, play music at a fairly good tempo and lastly watch non-HD movies. There is Google Play, so you can download games and apps too, but most games will just hang or run awkwardly on it.

For our final verdict, we put the tablet to our broad performance tests, to see where it stands amongst other 8k tablets. In Antutu test, it scored just 2153 which is very low. We have seen some 8k tablets register upto 5k. The score of 527 in Vellamo web browsing performance test is again among the lowest. The same average performance echoes in An3D bench and An3D bench XL 3D graphics test with ordinary scores of 4957 and 10077 respectively. Its battery lasted a decent 5hours in our battery test.

The tablet has dual cameras, the 2MP rear one looks a little washed out but so do the cameras in most of the budget tablets. The 0.3MP is good enough for video chats and conferences.

Most of the 8k tabs have 4GB internal storage, of course it can be expanded upto 32GB, but this has 8GB internal storage besides the 32GB external. The presence of SIM slot rids you of spending extra on a data card, but this one supports only 2G. A lot of tabs in this price range have 2G SIM slot and support 3G via dongle. It's better to go for tablets, like Zen A700, which support 3G via SIM and fall in the same price range.