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$45 tablets already for sale, but who would buy | 398 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
$45 tablets already for sale, but who would buy
Authored by: kuroshima on Tuesday, December 25 2012 @ 05:02 PM EST
I invented scraplet because it fits, and because the
customary term for them may not be suitable for Groklaw's
comment policy. I have bought my share of electronics from
DealExtreme and similar online stores, and the experience is
very hit and miss. Cases, shelves, screen protectors,
cables, etc? I never buy local because of the inflated
prices, and most Chinese stores will offer free worldwide
shipping. Anything with electronics or batteries inside?
Don't expect it to work after couple of months. Then again
sometimes you hit gold, and you paid less than 10% local
retail price (for similar no brand product, branded ones are
more expensive)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

$45 tablets already for sale, but who would buy
Authored by: symbolset on Wednesday, December 26 2012 @ 12:24 PM EST
I bought a pair of these, the SC-72MID. $89 each plus tax, delivered in the
US. Added a microsd card. I am happy with the purchase, and look forward
to
the progress the next year will bring. There are still awful cheap tablets
available, but now also some that are OK.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Not really that bad
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, December 27 2012 @ 03:05 AM EST
You can get a workable 7" IPS capacitive screen tablet in
the $75-$100 range or $150-$200 for a workable 9.7"-10.1"
tablet with some support. Build quality at those price
points isn't bad. Google Play store works on the new crop
that I have purchased, and on all of the tablets I have ever
purchased Amazon Market has worked.

I've been playing with these cheap Chinese Tablets for about
3 years now and have owned about 5 or 6 of them. The first
one I had was a Eken M001 and it truly was trash out of the
box (Flash the ROM and placed Moded firmware on it and it
was usable for web browsing, email, and book reading)...
The first one that worked well straight out of the box was
the Haipad (It uses a Telechips SOC).

All of the really cheap tablets these days are running the
AllWinner SOC right now, the cheap tablets at first were
running the WonderMedia/Via SOC. Both SOCs have issues.
The Allwinner SOC tends to be fast but tends to freeze (It freezes- wait for
the dialog then click wait and then it
runs for a while then will freeze again- press wait on the dialogue again and
runs for a while then freezes again) on
graphic heavy (Not video- it does video extremely well)
webpages/apps, especially if the flash player is installed,
while the Via/WonderMedia SOC just seems to be slow
(Comparatively) for it's specs on everything, but doesn't
actually freeze. The other issue shared by all of the cheap
tablets is battery life... I have yet to see a cheap
tablet with an in-use battery life greater than 4 hours and
some were 2 hours if WiFi was enabled.

The real problem with tablets, all of them, is this
though... For watching streaming videos, playing music,
checking email, accessing social media apps/pages, playing
simple games, videochat, Photos (I have seen people use them
for photos- the most bizarre use of a tablet I have ever
seen but it does work okay for that), and light web browsing
they work great. Even for writing short basic letters and
short memos they do allright (Most come with some sort of
office suite -- For the ones that don't, Kingsoft Office is
a free app). For anything more than that the form factor
itself really isn't suited for it.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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