Android Tablet: Mid Android Tablet

Mid Android Tablet

The MID M80003W. They recently populated their store with a number of cheap tablets, so we thought it was a good idea to see what one could expect from these products that seem to have flooded the market recently.

The MID M80003W tablet has a black front face with a silver back. It has an on/off button, a "back" button a'la iPad, and volume up/down buttons. It sports an 8" resistive touchscreen with 800x600 resolution (4:3). Also, it uses a VIA 8650 800 MHz CPU, 256 MB RAM (~200 MB available to the system, the rest is for graphics), 2 GB internal storage (400 MB available to the user), a microSDHC card slot, 3G wireless (W-CDMA, CDMA2000, TD-CDMA) support, a built-in VGA front web camera (3 MP for stills, possibly interpolated), speaker and microphone, headphones jack, and an orientation sensor. The device also comes with a dongle, that hosts two female USB ports, and one ethernet port. There is no micro-USB port for charging or PC data -- the power adapter port is proprietary.

If you do a quick round on various retailers' pages about any of these no-name (non-Google licensed) Android tablets you will see mostly negative comments about people complaining about bugs, speed, wifi incompatibilities, and what have you. I was hoping that this early stage of affairs was over, and newer no-name tablets, like this one running Froyo, would offer a better, more mature experience. But unfortunately it doesn't. The device is slow, very slow. It gets slower as much as you use it, usually 30 minutes after a clean boot. Gets better if you manually kill a few processes, like the Browser.

The device also has many bugs, including USB bugs that seem to crash the USB stack every few seconds. A 5 MB copy from a USB drive to the internal storage took about 20 minutes to complete. However, one thing did work well: WiFi compatibility with my WPA2 network (even if acquiring an IP address took a while). The device comes with CDMA 3G support, but since I don't have such an account I was not able to test it.