Original eBay 15% off Sitewide deal
It's a basic Windows tablet for less than 300. It comes with a keyboard attached (not removable) and features a full size Usb port. Poor man's surface!?
Full HD display (1080) 11.6 inches
Bay Trail processor (1.33 GHz clock)
2gb Ram
32gb eMMC
8000mah battery
Usually around 350.
Sorry for the lousy description, it's hard to type on SwiftKey.
Not for that price.
Is this or the T-100 (ASUS) better? Both seem to have similar specs (apart from the screen)
Asus has a slightly better processor
But lesser resolution display of 720p.
Will review it tonight when I get home from work. I'll tell you if it's worth buying.
Thankyou
Can someone confirm i can upgrade the ram to 4g in this?
The z3575f processor only supports 2GB of RAM.
Thanks for the info
I've been playing around with it a little bit this evening.
Pendo Pad Review —
So far so good. In the box, I got the tablet, charging AC adapter, a Micro USB OTG cable and the tablet itself.
Its unclear as to what the male to female Micro USB OTG cable is used for - the device has full size USB ports, meaning that the OTG cable is useless for this device. It does however have a Micro HDMI port, but there's no HDMI adapter included. Maybe they made a mistake? Puzzling indeed.
Let's review the build quality. Much of the chassis is plastic — the outer casing is made of a matte-black plastic with soft touch. It reminds me of the same soft-touch casing they use on Lenovo Edge series of laptops. The hinge on the device seems to be sturdy enough, despite it's dainty looks it offers enough resistance to allow you prop the device up in a 'tent' mode and there is even friction throughout the entire movement of the hinge. So far, I see no problem with the hinge mechanism and as long as you aren't too rough with it, it should hold up OK.
The charger on the other hand looks like it is a proprietary type — it delivers 3 amps of power to charge the tablet via a 'pin' type power jack — it looks VERY prone to breaking if the charging cable were to snag on something. It's a very outdated design, but… for a device that retails for $350 some cost cutting would've been neccessary. -1 point.
The build quality gets a 3 star ★★★☆☆ rating
KEYBOARD, like many snap-on Bluetooth keyboards that you are used, this keyboard feels rather cramped, and the typing experience is pretty mediocre. The keys have a pretty short total key travel and are quite shallow. Long typing sessions will be tiring — it's probably best to pack your own full size keyboard if you have large hands.
Keyboard Layout image
Compare this to
Keyboard Layout on a Surface Pro Type Cover
The keyboard IMO is unncessarily cramped because of the extra large touchpad they've implemented — a touchscreen convertible doesn't need that large of a touchpad — you'll never use it anyway. You can see that the SHIFT key is absurdly small and far too often I find my pinky hitting the UP arrow key.
Also note the addition of a special key that acts as a quick ".com" macro and a button that disables the touchpad. You'll find yourself using that touchpad disable button quite a lot, because the touchpad lacks any kind of palm rejection function and even a slight brush will move the cursor.
The ".com" button — I have no idea why it's there and it frankly could've been much better if the UP key was moved to the right and the SHIFT key is enlarged.
A switch on the left side of the tablet allows you to turn the keyboard on and off, preventing accidental keypresses when the device is used in tablet mode. there is a volume rocker and power button on the same side.
The touchpad is pretty ho-hum and is probably some kind of cheap generic, not some quality one made by Synaptics. There were no special drivers installed for it so only the two most basic windows gestures work (e.g two finger scrolling and two finger tap), I have not tested the other gestures extensively — you probably won't care since there's a touchscreen anyway…
Keyboard and touchpad rating: 2 stars ★★☆☆☆
Lets move on to the DISPLAY. The Display is a FHD IPS panel with wide viewing angles. Pendo has actually not cut corners with the display. The colors look accurate and the brightness is sufficient. However, when you are viewing a grey background, you can see some lines running vertically on the screen. This is probably some kind of conductive elements of the digitizer panel. It's typically not visible during normal use, and you'll probably never even notice in your daily usage.
Speaking of the display, the top half of the device is not well reinforced and if you put pressure on the screen you'll see some marks appear on the LCD panel. The display has a screen protector already pre-applied, I haven't taken it off yet and don't intend to as it has no bubbles anyway.
Display and Touch screen rating: 4.5 stars ★★★★⋆
Let's talk about the PORTS and AUDIO. There are two ordinary USB ports on each side. On the right hand side, there's a Micro SD slot and Micro HDMI output, and on the other is the 3.5mm audio jack. There are also two stereo speakers on the bottom of unit which are surprisingly not tinny and when cranked all the way up, doesn't distort or crackle. The sound quality is actually excellent making this a passable unit for media consumption.
4.5 stars ★★★★⋆ for ports, but I have to take away half a point because my SD card did actually get stuck inside the card slot and took me a good 10 minutes to unjam it. It only happened with a specific SD card though, so it could be the card's fault.
PERFORMANCE Now the most important bit… how does it perform? With only 2GB of RAM you will really need to be conservative with how many apps you run and how many tabs are opened. After booting up Windows, Task Man reports 0.9 GB of RAM is used, and running Pale Moon (with adblocking plugin uBlock Origin) with 5 tabs open on various different websites (Reddit, Amazon, eBay, Ozbargain and playing a Youtube video at 720P takes another 415 megabytes of RAM, leaving me with just 700 MB free. CPU utilisation sat at around 33% with the Flash video playing.
At the same time, I opened the MSY Part.PDF — a not-so-complex document that contains little images but a lot of coloured text and tables, but it still took some time to render completely (about 10 seconds). CPU then pretty much maxed out as it rendered the file and the RAM usage shot up by another 100MB, leaving me with just 600MB.
Geekbench results Single Core 737, Multicore 2150
The device did become warm after doing these tests but not uncomfortably so.
Hard disk currently reading 13/28.2 gigabytes, this is after installing a few apps like Pale Moon, Daum media player and the latest Windows update (Windows 10 Build number 1511). Highly recommend to use removable media such as SD cards and USB dongles.
BATTERY LIFE This is mostly untested as I just unboxed the unit and fully charged it up, but a rough estimation given by windows is 8 hours of run-time.
Verdict: This is overall, a pretty nice unit. For the price I paid for it, and the roles I intend for this little netbook to fill (as a media consumption tablet), I gave it a passing grade of around 7/10. However if you're thinking of buying a machine more for work than for play, it's probably best to look elsewhere and buy a better brand with a more up-to-date processor, a better keyboard layout and at the very least, 4GB of RAM.
Excellent Review! WOW
Is this tablet any good?