The Chinavasion tablet offers up an eight inch resistive touch screen showing at 800 x 600 resolution, backed up by an 800 MHz CPU with 256 meg of RAM and Android 2.2, as well as wi-fi capability and a micro USB port, as well as an adapter for a full-sized USB connection and an Ethernet jack, which is actually a nifty idea in its own right if the tablet itself were a worthwhile experience. Read this review to find out more about it.
Chinavasion Tablet Specs
Where do I begin to describe my experience with this execrable device? Shall I start at the slow processor speed? Shall I begin at the semi-responsive touch screen that ignored about one command in six? Too many possibilities, and frankly, all of them are bad.
Now, to be fair, I tried it as a variety of potential devices. I tried it as a gaming device–in fact, they even accommodated my efforts by offering up what looked like a complete copy of Angry Birds. But when I tried to play it, it ran so slowly that the game regularly lagged, sufficient to the point where watching the birds do their customary back flip could be witnessed in a six-frame action, complete with pauses in the middle. I tried it as a netsurfing device, but pages loaded so slowly it wasn’t even useful.
However, I did discover, to my deep surprise, that as a video player, this worked and looked great. It also did a nice job on music and text, which gives you some limited value here. I say limited, of course, because while it does do a nice job with video, getting it to work with a USB drive is going to be extremely difficult, so transferring the necessary video onto the device’s lower-end storage space (not even one full gig) is going to be a holy terror. I couldn’t even get a standard SD card to work on this device because, of all things, there was no slot on the device into which an SD card would fit. Horrified doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction to a tablet PC that couldn’t handle a standard SD card. They’re not that big.
But considering that Chinavasion is asking $100 for each one of these, well, it’s really more of those get what you pay for sorts of situations. And when I told them about the absolutely horrendous time I was having with this tablet, they suggested several potential fixes, and they were some help. But still, you should never have to download extra programs to take your tablet from “mostly useless” to “approaching functional”.
So if you’re looking for a tablet to serve as a glorified ereader that will also handle video and tackle some very, very light web surfing…you should probably go with a Kindle or a Nook instead. The Chinavasion tablet just isn’t up to the job.
The Good
Nice resolution on the display
Decent job with video, audio and text
The Bad
Horrendously slow
Touch screen often ignores commands
Score 3 / 10