Broadly speaking there are two types of Android tablet – major-brand and China OEM. The former are late to market but predictably high specification and high cost. The latter are rapid with development and production and produce a wide selection of devices at a great price. But because of the nature of the China OEM market, buying such a non-brand product can have its pitfalls. The main issue is that production lines don’t generally involve quality control. Basic testing yes, but not on every device and not sufficiently thorough. That’s why it’s important to purchase from a reputable and established company such as The Tablet Store.
At The Tablet Store we appoint independent quality controllers at the production facility where we require rigorous testing of every device so we are certain that 100% of our stock is certified suitable for sale before leaving China. Furthermore we check stock again in the UK to ensure that no damages have occurred or faults developed during transit. We continue our commitement to quality by partnering with trusted shipping companies to get the product safely to you – the customer – and finally back up our promise with a 1 year warranty and excellent online support.
The final part if the jigsaw puzzle of bringing good products to customers is our rigorous testing of new products. We use our China based agents to scour the market and test new products before they enter mainstream production, and have anything above average sent to us for further testing in the UK. That means if we don’t stock a product is likely to have been rejected by our testing process.
The remainder of this guide is split into two sections covering the OEM and Brand tablets.
OEM products
The main defining characteristic of an OEM Android tablet is the CPU. This is because the CPU will effect what version of Android will operate on the device and so characterize the whole experience of the product, as well as of course the performance you can expect. For any one CPU there are a number of different products and although they typically adhere to a common hardware specification there may be differences in anything from Flash capacity to screen dimensions. But essentially, the software and upgradeability of the software are tied to the CPU.
The main defining characteristic of an Android tablet is the CPU. This is because the CPU will effect what version of Android will operate on the device and so characterize the whole experience of the product, as well as of course the performance you can expect. For any one CPU there are a number of different products and although they typically adhere to a common hardware specification there may be differences in anything from Flash capacity to screen dimensions. But essentially, the software and upgradeability of the software are tied to the CPU.
Android tablets have a little history to them including use by companies such as Archos and other as the base OS for their product. However, the underlying OS was not the selling point of such devices. Really, the first noticed Android tablets were simple 7" devices running with a VIA processor.
Android tablets started to get well known because of some videos posted on YouTube of a product called the EKEN. Not specific to the product but rather just one of the manufacturers, the Eken, or M001, ran on a VIA 8505 533 MHz processor. The tablet sold for as little as $99 and got the energy going in the Android tablet market place. In our opinion, the interest in this product really fuelled development of other products and in particular helped to wake up Shenzhen to the reality that the rest of the world didn't care about Windows CE... we wanted Android! The M001 wasn't really any good though. We tested it, and by the time it came to launching our site we were more interested in better devices. Essentially the VIA was a low end chip and it was bundled with low RAM, low storage and didn't make for an attractive device. Interestingly we have now come full circle and whilst our best sellers are more expensive models there is still strong demand for budget devices and we have returned to a VIA based platform to fulfil that interest. VIA are an enormous and well established chip manufacturer and the design houses working with this architecture have pushed the platform further than their competitors at Rockchip resulting in a neat device that runs Android 1.6 Donut. Our current low-end device is a VIA based tablet that unlike most imitations on the market is very reliable, has a great interface, has 256MB of RAM and a decent 2GB of flash memory. For customers looking into tablets as colour ebook readers and devices for their kids to facebook on this has become a solid choice. Even the battery life on our device is very good compared with other budget devices around.
The Rockchip based devices is where business essentially got moving for The Tablet Store. The CPU used in these devices is the Rockchip 2808, a 'dual-core' architecture which encompasses a 600MHz ARM9 core plus a 533MHz Digital Signal Processor. This meant the Rockchip devices played back video a little better than the VIA devices but the improvement was not dramatic. Upon release there wasn't anything better so we and our customers jumped on them. Now that we have newer devices that can playback just about any video format at any resolution flawlessly this aspect of the Rockchip is no longer anything special. For all the buzz words such as 'dual-core' and 'DSP' the Rockchip was essentially another budget device, except unlike the VIA it's architecture limited it to 128MB of RAM and the Android OS was determined to be forever stuck on version 1.5 Donut. This was frustrating as many apps, most notably Amazon's Kindle, required 1.6. As a result we no longer sell Rockchip devices but remember them fondly for many hundreds we moved in 2010.
Next up in the chronology of Android tablets is Telechips. Unlike the others above, Telechips is Korean not Chinese. The Telechips TCC8902 ARM11 720MHz CPU generally comes with 256MB RAM and has accommodated Android 2.1 from the start. Earlier devices such as Rockchip and VIA were an ARM9 platform so CPU speed aside ARM11 is more capable per clock cycle. Also common to the Telechips devices is HDMI output onboard which along with the obvious performance boosts and much-demanded newer version of Android, makes the Telechips an attractive series of tablets. The Telechips platform has developed continuously and we have already moved through a number of generations of this product as new features are added to the hardware specification.
The next storm in the Android tablet world is Zenithink. Their 1GHz ARM11 device was immediately in the spotlight for being a 1GHz device and also for starting as a 10" tablet, so expecting to squarely target the Apple iPad competitor. However, Zenithink really handled the whole affair terribly. Firstly they lied and suggested that the processor was a Cortex A8, which it is not (and to this day many still claim that it is). Secondly, they released the product with some really very shaky software. We have the devices here on test and although some updates have improved the device, there are still no working Android applications such as GMail and Market, so ultimately the product is not yet ready for us to comfortably sell and support. Fortunately the hardware seems fairly solid - and with reason. The device has actually been around for far longer then its recent foray into the Android world, as a Win CE device of course! So essentially Zenithink jumped onboard the good ship Google, but forgot to pack properly.
Next on the scene are tablets using the Texas Instruments 600MHz Cortex A8 processor, first integrated into a 7 inch device by a company called Witstech. So finally we have a real Cortex up and running in an Android tablet. Again we would like to highlight the generation jump in chip technology as more important than CPU speed - Cortex is a generation above ARM11. The device is still in its early days although already you can run Android 2.2 Froyo on the device which is going to rouse plenty of interest. However, Witstech is just 1 company that have jumped on the TI chip very early. In our opinion the hardware specification should offer more for the price. Watch this space for future devices based on the TI AM35x ARM Cortex A8, and come to think of it, why not the 1GHz chip from TI?
Another chip being used in Android tablets is the Marvell PXA303 Xscale 624Mhz which is a snappy little low power chip with much to offer. Although not currently onboard with many devices it is in our sole 5” android offering which performs really well and has integrated 3G and GPS.
Relatively new to the Android Tablet market are freescale chips. Although immediately popular for being a Cortex CPU the platform is not cheap so manufacturers have cut corners in every other way resulting in terrible quality devices. As such we dare not sell Freescale yet. A typical corner that is cut is with regards to the storage of the device. Instead of using proper NAND flash for the job manufacturers have instead been used TransFlash (microSD) cards internally for the job. Not only is the storage medium not designed for use in this way it's unreliable and the cards can loosen meaning you would lose the entire device. The first properly built devices are now beginning to emerge but at too high a price (e.g. over £300) but watch this space for the first Freescale tablet we find worthy of selling.
Brand products
There are now major brands entering the tablet market in the lead up to Christmas including offerings from Samsung, Dell, Toshiba, HP, Asus, Hannspree and others. We are working on expanding this article to include summaries of each company’s offering, so check back soon for more information.
Android tablets started to get well known because of some videos posted on YouTube of a product called the EKEN. Not specific to the product but rather just one of the manufacturers, the Eken, or M001, ran on a VIA 8505 533 MHz processor. The tablet sold for as little as $99 and got the energy going in the Android tablet market place. In our opinion, the interest in this product really fuelled development of other products and in particular helped to wake up Shenzhen to the reality that the rest of the world didn't care about Windows CE... we wanted Android! The M001 wasn't really any good though. We tested it, and by the time it came to launching our site we were more interested in better devices. Essentially the VIA was a low end chip and it was bundled with low RAM, low storage and didn't make for an attractive device. Interestingly we have now come full circle and whilst our best sellers are more expensive models there is still strong demand for budget devices and we have returned to a VIA based platform to fulfil that interest. VIA are an enormous and well established chip manufacturer and the design houses working with this architecture have pushed the platform further than their competitors at Rockchip resulting in a neat device that runs Android 1.6 Donut. Our current low-end device is a VIA based tablet that unlike most imitations on the market is very reliable, has a great interface, has 256MB of RAM and a decent 2GB of flash memory. For customers looking into tablets as colour ebook readers and devices for their kids to facebook on this has become a solid choice. Even the battery life on our device is very good compared with other budget devices around.
The Rockchip based devices is where business essentially got moving for The Tablet Store. The CPU used in these devices is the Rockchip 2808, a 'dual-core' architecture which encompasses a 600MHz ARM9 core plus a 533MHz Digital Signal Processor. This meant the Rockchip devices played back video a little better than the VIA devices but the improvement was not dramatic. Upon release there wasn't anything better so we and our customers jumped on them. Now that we have newer devices that can playback just about any video format at any resolution flawlessly this aspect of the Rockchip is no longer anything special. For all the buzz words such as 'dual-core' and 'DSP' the Rockchip was essentially another budget device, except unlike the VIA it's architecture limited it to 128MB of RAM and the Android OS was determined to be forever stuck on version 1.5 Donut. This was frustrating as many apps, most notably Amazon's Kindle, required 1.6. As a result we no longer sell Rockchip devices but remember them fondly for many hundreds we moved in 2010.
Next up in the chronology of Android tablets is Telechips. Unlike the others above, Telechips is Korean not Chinese. The Telechips TCC8902 ARM11 720MHz CPU generally comes with 256MB RAM and has accommodated Android 2.1 from the start. Earlier devices such as Rockchip and VIA were an ARM9 platform so CPU speed aside ARM11 is more capable per clock cycle. Also common to the Telechips devices is HDMI output onboard which along with the obvious performance boosts and much-demanded newer version of Android, makes the Telechips an attractive series of tablets. The Telechips platform has developed continuously and we have already moved through a number of generations of this product as new features are added to the hardware specification.
The next storm in the Android tablet world is Zenithink. Their 1GHz ARM11 device was immediately in the spotlight for being a 1GHz device and also for starting as a 10" tablet, so expecting to squarely target the Apple iPad competitor. However, Zenithink really handled the whole affair terribly. Firstly they lied and suggested that the processor was a Cortex A8, which it is not (and to this day many still claim that it is). Secondly, they released the product with some really very shaky software. We have the devices here on test and although some updates have improved the device, there are still no working Android applications such as GMail and Market, so ultimately the product is not yet ready for us to comfortably sell and support. Fortunately the hardware seems fairly solid - and with reason. The device has actually been around for far longer then its recent foray into the Android world, as a Win CE device of course! So essentially Zenithink jumped onboard the good ship Google, but forgot to pack properly.
Next on the scene are tablets using the Texas Instruments 600MHz Cortex A8 processor, first integrated into a 7 inch device by a company called Witstech. So finally we have a real Cortex up and running in an Android tablet. Again we would like to highlight the generation jump in chip technology as more important than CPU speed - Cortex is a generation above ARM11. The device is still in its early days although already you can run Android 2.2 Froyo on the device which is going to rouse plenty of interest. However, Witstech is just 1 company that have jumped on the TI chip very early. In our opinion the hardware specification should offer more for the price. Watch this space for future devices based on the TI AM35x ARM Cortex A8, and come to think of it, why not the 1GHz chip from TI?
Another chip being used in Android tablets is the Marvell PXA303 Xscale 624Mhz which is a snappy little low power chip with much to offer. Although not currently onboard with many devices it is in our sole 5” android offering which performs really well and has integrated 3G and GPS.
Relatively new to the Android Tablet market are freescale chips. Although immediately popular for being a Cortex CPU the platform is not cheap so manufacturers have cut corners in every other way resulting in terrible quality devices. As such we dare not sell Freescale yet. A typical corner that is cut is with regards to the storage of the device. Instead of using proper NAND flash for the job manufacturers have instead been used TransFlash (microSD) cards internally for the job. Not only is the storage medium not designed for use in this way it's unreliable and the cards can loosen meaning you would lose the entire device. The first properly built devices are now beginning to emerge but at too high a price (e.g. over £300) but watch this space for the first Freescale tablet we find worthy of selling.
