GooPad's eight-incher gives Apple fans cheap relief Knock-off iPad manufacturer GooPad has followed Apple and unveiled a mini version of its i-style slate. It packs similar specs, ish, but as you can imagine, has a far cheaper price than the real thing. The GooPad Mini may be devoid of the highly-sought fruit logo, but with an 8in display at 1080 x 768 pixels, a 1.4GHz dual- …
Hey up, what's the state of play with these cheap tablets? Are they still the false economy that they were, or have they improved?
Anyone got any experiences, good or bad? A year ago everyone was recommending the Curry's tablet whose name I've forgotten, but these days everyone seems to be talking about Google and Amazon's offerings, plus BB Playbooks, in the sub-£200 range.
I got a cheapo resistive android tablet July 2011 - but that was fairly crap. Really only usable as an ebook reader, email, RSS, music and low-res video. Simple stuff. Web browsing was possible but slow and painful and games were a no-no.
In May this year I got a new cheapo chinese one. It has a 1.2GHz CPU plus a 400MHz Mali GPU, 512MB RAM and 16GB of storage. Then it was £90 - I've seen them lately for £65-70. It runs Android 4.0.4 and most of the time it flies along. Web browsing is a joy, it makes a brilliant kindle, good for games, I've watched countless videos on it both on the screen and using the HDMI port to output to a big telly. Overall, it is WELL worth the money and makes some of the £400-500 tablets look daft. I use it every day and the kids also love it.
HOWEVER, there are (of course) a couple of limitations. Some stuff in the Android Marketplace isn't compatible with it. I'm not 100% sure why. But If I search for some apps (Amazon App as an example) it will tell me I can install it on my 2-year-old Android phone but not the tablet - might be the lack of GPS. Who knows.
Very occasionally, it goes slow for a couple of minutes. Usually it pops back again but sometimes it requires a reboot. I suspect it is doing some house keeping in the background.
If I were buying now, I'd get the Ainol Fire (about £110 on Amazon) with a dual-core CPU, more RAM, better display and metal body. But the cheap tablets ARE very good and have the advantage of HDMI, MicroSD and USB ports so carrying around a bunch of music and films becomes incredibly easy.
@Basset if it was an early Ainol model, the incompatible apps would have been because they used MIPS CPUs instead of ARM (anything that uses the native-code NDK instead of regular Dalvik has to be compiled separately for each architecture). Ainol already switched to ARM for their latest tablets, probably for this reason.
On the subject of 8" android tablets, the one in the article is nothing new - my colleague bought a Teclast p85 for a similar price to the one in the article a few months ago, 1024x768 screen and everything. The Yuandao n80 is another 8" 1024x768 tablet thats been around for a while - haven't played with that one but apart from the screen it's the same as their n70 which I have and works very nicely (also under $100 for the 8GB version). No fake iOS skin though.
Like bassey, I got a cheap 7" tablet (800*480, resistive, gingerbread) last year. Angry Birds was fine, wi-fi was erratic, Firefox was too slow to be usable, but it played side-loaded videos fine.
We've just replaced it with an £80 Zoostorm tablet. Higher res, capacitive, ICS, Google apps/store. Wi-fi works (though not on enterprise/eduroam type networks) and it's just about perfect. The only bad points are the lack of charging over USB (dedicated 5V charger boo), the inset headphone socket, and it's a bit heavier than the old tablet. Also there's no GPS, but I'm not complaining at £80.
Then, next time Apple pull 'em up in court they can enter them as evidence with the pointed comment; "Remind me again, why are you sueing us?".
Sueing the big company that makes something a bit similar to your product, while quietly ignoring the small one that makes something exactly like your product, looks suspiciously like just going after the cash rather than defending the design.
Don't normally get posts saying that the problem with patent/design rights is that the big boys only pick on each other and don't go after the little guys. Having said that I'm sure Apple will try to take some action in any territory where they reasonably can for such a blatant rip off. Actually with that photo it is more a trading standards (or local equivalent) than a design rights issue.
... people feel the need to exactly rip off the ipad. Fine, build a tablet and get taken to court by apple because they think it looks too similar to an ipad when really it's just the resultant shape of the function it provides - *our* tablet looks like *your* tablet and *every other* tablet, because it is a tablet and a tablet needs to be that shape ... roughly.
But, if you want an ipad get an ipad. If you dont care about the ipad get an Android. Why buy somethinig that looks like an ipad?
I don't get it, personally, if I was buying a tablet to display to the world on my way to work, which I don't, then I would want something that doesn't make me look like a sheep.
@shade82000: "But, if you want an ipad get an ipad. If you dont care about the ipad get an Android. Why buy somethinig that looks like an ipad?"
LOL, for *this* price, I'd buy it just to f***off my Apple loving colleagues.. :)
Having a couple of good laughs for a few tenners is like going to the theater: only afterwards you have a nice toy leftover to play with too...
Think of the horror on some poor sod's face, as they feverishly tear the wrapping paper off one of these crappers on Christmas morning, thinking for one fleeting second that they've got an iPad. Only to have their stomach lurch as realisation dawns and they know they'll have to look up in a second and unflinchingly meet granny's gaze and force a broken-hearted smile, as the sweet old dear asks anxiously, "Was that the one you wanted? The man in the shop said it was the one everybody wanted"
If you were at all concerned about the wages and conditions of employees building Apple products at Foxconn, think about the people working in the sweatshops where they can build tablets that retail for $99.
Given that the Nexus at $199 is apparently sold at cost, somebody is cutting corners somewhere...
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