It’s raining tablets these days in India, but not all tablets are worth buying matter how cheap they may be.
Quality is the main concern for buyers. Though, a tablet within Rs 12,000 is a bargain, but then that isn’t small amount for many of us, and therefore it is important that the tablet you buy does its stated job well.
Let’s have a look at what Spice MiTab Mi720 has in store for us.
Looks
There is nothing much to talk about on the design front. It is a bar shaped full touch device. Its only striking design element is a white glossy back with stylised S (Spice logo) below a pair of PIN stripes. There is also a 2.0 Megapixel camera, which is slightly off centered to the left and has a Chrome finished ring around it. That’s about it.
Buttons are typical of Android phones – this can be called a phone with big screen running Android 2.2. There are three capacitive touch buttons at the bottom and when kept horizontal there is a front camera in the top middle, the rest is all screen surrounded by black glossy finish. In terms of buttons and ports the tablet has (when kept horizontal) microSD and SIM slots at the bottom along with the mic port, and on the top right hand corner are the power and lock button. On the left side there is volume rocker apart from reset button, and on the right is the USB port, charger socket, and a 3.5 mm jack.
Specifications
The tablet is fairly well equipped for a budget device. It has a 7 inch capacitive touchscreen (two point touch) with 800 x 480 pixel Resolution which is decent. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MHz Turbo Processor that the tablet comes with is good enough to handle little bit of multitasking that most tasks that a buyer in this range looks for. We played few games on the tablet and it worked without a glitch.
Other features include GPS, 3G with up to 7.2 Mbps speed, Bluetooth, WiFi, and SIM calling support, front VGA camera for video calling, 4200 mAh battery which offers very good battery backup of almost a day on a single charge and that is much above average for a tablet. The internal memory is very little and camera doesn’t start without the SDcard in place, which by the way allows 32 GB expandable space.
Spice has also preloaded the tablet with a lot of useful apps such as Hindustan Times, iBibo, free SMS, Documents to Go, File Explorer, RailYatra etc.
Given that it is a budget device, the specifications are good. In fact, for this price you will only get a 3.2 inch Android smartphone from MNC brands like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson etc.
Performance
This is a budget tablet, so expecting iPad-like performance is certainly not on the cards. But no matter how cheap your buy is, it is quite natural to expect that the device would perform in a way that doesn’t annoy you with sluggish or no response and should do the job it is meant to do without much effort.
And this Spice tablet does pretty well. It is a stretched Android 2.2 phone, and therefore does all that an Android phone does and in a similar fashion. Its GPS Navigation works better than it would on a phone thanks to a bigger screen which renders bigger maps with better visibility.
The mobile and WiFi signals are captured well, and is evident from the fact that I got full signal even while at home, where the signal strength is very low.
The browsing experience or watching videos is also pleasurable due to a large screen and decent processing speed. Gaming was also good. However, do not expect to run graphics heavy games like Asphalt 6 Adrenaline.
On the negative side, we faced issues when the SIM got stuck in its slot, and we had to pull it out with forceps. While it can be a rare issue, overall build quality is slightly iffy with few misplaced bits here and there, though it is certainly not a big problem.
Verdict
The tablet is one of the best in the budget range as far as features are concerned. We are currently testing tablets from HCL and Fly, and have already tested Reliance 3G Tab, and Beetel Magiq. This Spice tablet is a good buy if you want a cheap but functional tablet. The tablet has almost all the features any other tablet offers and it performs well.