It's really hard to believe that a tablet can be under £30. I mean seriously, a dual core 4GB tablet, with a touch screen (granted its resistive, thus cheaper), and its not exactly a winner in style. But that doesn't get part the point that this tablet was shipped to me for £27. The cheapest shipping i've seen from China is north of a fiver for a small packet, which means this is basically twenty pounds of tablet.
So, granted it was free shipping, it took a while. Roughly 4 weeks ago I ordered it on a whim via Paypal, with a credit card the website (www.fasttech.com) looks legit, but so do LOTS of scams these days, but sure enough, it arrived. Paypal seems OK, as does the credit card, so thus far it doesn't look like it's been skimmed.
Anyway, risks and bad stuff aside, here it is. the cheapest tablet I've ever seen. I'll blame the post for the crumpled box forcing it through my letter box (thanks Royal Mail) and in fairness, I had opened already opened it it by the time I took this.
Oh wow! Instructions!... are not a lot of use (unsurprisingly).
The tablet itself, 4.3" screen, 4GB memory (roughly 1GB space to apps and stuff), microSD slot, WiFi, 3.5mm jack and a micro USB to charge and transfer stuff.
It came pre-installed with Android 4.1 which was nice, and after reading a few reviews found a few issues which actually haven't panned out as bad as they were presented.
Problem 1:
One reviewer had poor quality and sound level from the jack, but the speaker was fine, blaming it being cheap. Mine works perfectly well so i'll chalk that up to a dodgy unit.
No dedicated Home button, however, given a bit of exploring the power button, when held down to turn it off (for about a second or two) gives two options, Power Off, or Home. So, negated again. There are also a few other buttons in the form of rocker switches, one for volume up and down and the other works as a back button and settings button.
Problem 3:
The touchscreen isn't very responsive. Well, its resistive, so it wont be, I really don't know what people expected from something this cheap. It's still multi-touch and in all honesty it's not like i have to drag my nail across it and scratch the surface to do anything, its just a slightly firmer press than a 'normal' (read capacitive) phone screen.
Problem 4:
The resolution is low. Yes, yes it is. It also said the resolution when you buy it and given its a small screen, you're not going to get retina levels of ppi. The only down side I found was the grid on the home screens is 4x2 default, which is a bit small. Quick applications of a custom UI (Launcher Pro) and it works just as well in 4x3, giving a little more room and with smaller icons, a slightly better image.
The plan for this was to combine it into the dashboard of my golf for sat-nav suing my phone as a WiFi hotspot. The problem being (and maybe i got carried away with just how cheap it was) I over looked it doesn't have GPS.
And really, I don't care! I've got other uses for this in mind (even when I bought it, i had more than one idea) so it'll still work perfectly fine for what I want (I hope). And if it doesn't, I still wont care, because i'll find a use for it somewhere, even if its just a toy to marvel at how stupidly cheap things can be.
Once i've had a play with it a little more using googlemaps and WiFi location data and post some more findings. Maybe it will end up in the golf after all.
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