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The Budget Tablet: What You Should Be Looking For

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PCQ Bureau
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What will you miss if you buy a cheap budget tab?

To those interested in this segment, price is the biggest inducer, but to know a tablet before buying is better than to scold it later. Most budget tabs, including Aakash have been found to be struggling in their input capabilities. The first version of Aakash was also flanked for its poor sound quality, low memory and frequent system hang ups but all that seems to have been addressed satisfactorily in the second instalment, Aakash 2, which now has a capacitive screen. But the response is still slow and the touch response is hungry for a better tap, since they still run on single core 1GHz processors.

What can you do with a cheap

budget tablet?

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There are still good reasons to invest in this segement, for instance they boast of a 3000 mAh battery which could last up to 5 hours with video streaming via WiFi. They feature mini USB or micro USB charging ports besides a dedicated charging port in case one of them malfunctions. It was amazing to find that even tablets as low as Rs 4k support 3G, mostly via a USB dongle which also means you have to invest Rs 2-3k more to get a

USB data card. It seems they all support 3G in a similar way as we didin't find integrated 3G in any of them.

This furher investment means your tablet's price goes

up by Rs 2k, unless you don't need 3G at all and rely entirely on a WiFi connection. But tablets with in-built

3G begin at Rs 10k, such as the Swype Hello or Reliance 3G tab.

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They don't disappoint in terms of connectivity

Budget tablets have been equipped with almost all useful ports. You can connect through HDMI and run content on a bigger display. With a micro SD card you can access and store multimedia files on the tablet apart from the inbuilt 2-4 GB storage. A 3.5 mm jack for speakers and headphones, a USB 2.0 port for charging and connecting to USB based devices are also available. GPRS, WiFi, Bluetooth and 3G support are also to be found. So you can do anything that you could on other tablets.

They have the newest Android versions

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Almost all budget tablets tested by us are based on Google Android 4.0 ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich OS). Whether they can be upgraded to Android Jelly Bean OS is still unclear. Upgradability is a nice feature to have as it would mean more optimized performance on these tablets which are anyways low on hardware.

Who benefits from this segment?

School students with a limited budget is the primary

target audience for budget tablets as they can run education apps with elan. They are bound to find a disconnect with the urban youth who are already using smartphones with better configuration than these tablets. However, a vast section of students from primary schools can greatly benefit from these tablets as a PC is still out of budget in many government schools. Also, those who want to browse Internet and watch videos on a display bigger than their phones and smaller than their laptops will find this segment very useful and entertaining. Since these tabs allow you to download apps from Google

Play App store, you can use these to download and run basic apps. Don't expect to run too many apps simultaneously though.

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Antutu benchmark

AnTuTu Benchmark can run a full test of a key project, through the memory performance, CPU integer performance, CPU Floating point performance, 2D & 3D graphics performance, SD card reading/writing speed, and Database I/O performance. The performance of hardware is also taken into account in reaching the overall and individual scores.

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An3DBench & An3DBenchXL

The An3DBench application gives you the ability to put your tablet to test and figure out exactly what it is capable of running without problems. With the app you will be able to perform several different graphic tests so that you can be sure that you donâ??t overload your phone with games and apps that are too heavy. This is also excellent for knowing whether your phone is good for watching movies without experiencing lag.

Vellamo Web benchmark

Vellamo is designed to be an accurate, easy to use suite of system-level benchmarks for devices based on Android 2.3. Primarily it has two chapters: HTML 5 & Metal. The HTML5 Chapter is a set of system-level web browsing tests. This series of tests evaluates many of the underlying systems within a device, from graphics rendering and JavaScript to pixel blending and network stack performance.

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