Android Tablet: Superpad 10.2 Tablet PC

Superpad 10.2 Tablet PC

The Superpad 10.2 inch tablet computer is a budget Android tablet that is surprisingly well featured when considering the very reasonable price. At around $200, it competes nicely with similar devices that are available and was shipped quickly from the manufacturer.

The touch screen is 10.2 inches, and is resistive rather than capacitive. This can cause some problems, and when the device was first unboxed the screen was very inaccurate. Calibration helped, making the onscreen keyboard letters line up correctly. Unfortunately it did not remove the tendency for the screen to wobble, or flicker from side to side when trying to scroll or type. Resolution was ok, but didn’t seem as clear as the claimed 1024×600 should be.

The processor is supposed to be a 1GHz processor, but this did not honestly respond like a 1Ghz processor should do. It was somewhat slow compared to other devices whose speed has been confirmed, but for a tablet in this price range it performed as about expected. There is 256MB of RAM included, which ran Android well.

The internal storage of the tablet is just 2GB, and around half of this is eaten up by the Android operating system. Thankfully there are two slots for micro SD cards, each of which can support up to 16GB, bringing a total of 34GB of storage to this device. With the fact that the cards can be removed and replaced with another, empty card when it is filled up, this is more than sufficient.

There are also two USB ports included, and this allows you to connect to a USB flash drive, or external hard drive for more storage. Perhaps more usefully, the USB connections can be used to connect a keyboard and mouse to the tablet, allowing you to type on a fully sized keyboard. This is far easier than using the on-screen keyboard, and faster too. Both keyboard and mouse responded well.

A webcam is built into the tablet, and though it’s quality isn’t great, it is sufficient for supporting video chat, which works well. GPS is also advertised, but is a little misleading. There is no GPS chip built into the tablet, but instead a GPS antennae that you need to plug in. Once in place it works well, but the size of the tablet meant that it wouldn’t fit into the majority of cradles-a specialist, large cradle would be needed in order to use this as a sat nav system.

Disappointingly the only charging was via a wall charger, and it was proprietary. USB charging is becoming the standard today, and so the fact that this required a special charger was inconvenient and worrying, since it means that it must always be carried.

There are a lot of drawbacks to this cheap tablet, but those should be viewed in comparison to the other tablets that cost around the same amount. In it’s price range this performs well, with fast internet over WiFi, and limited video support, making it one of the better choices for a cheap tablet for mobile browsing, or as a gift for kids.