First Impressions of Polaroid’s New 4.3″ Android PMP

10.03.2012 Nate Hoffelder No Comments

This morning I picked up a Polaroid PMID4300 at BigLots, and I have to say that it’s not bad for a $60 device. For some time now I’ve been looking for a cheap Android handheld and this might be it.

This was one of the new gadgets that Southern Telecom had on display in their booth at CES 2012, and it looks like I am the first to post a review. I just barely touched on it back in January, so specs and some background would probably be a good idea.

This is a 4.3″ Android tablet, and it’s running v2.2 Froyo on a Rockchip RK2818 CPU (600MHz). It has a resistive touchscreen, 4GB Flash storage, microSD card slot, Wifi, and speaker/mike. I don’t know the screen resolution, but I would bet that it’s 480×272.

There are 3 buttons below the screen (power, back, menu), and they’re the only buttons on the device. The home button and volume buttons are on the screen. The ports and card slots are on the lower edge. The mike is on the left edge and the speaker is on the upper left rear corner.

It comes with quite a few apps, including Kobo, Adobe Reader, Twitter, NYTimes, and the usual email, browser, file manager. Note that there’s no Android Market (Google Play) or Amazon Appstore, so you’ll need to find a source of apps (Freeware Lovers is good.)

So I’ve set up Kobo, watched a few Youtube videos, and did some basic browsing. The speaker isn’t very loud, but this is a small device so I would rate it as adequate (you’re going to be using headphones, anyway).

The screen is rather dim, compared to most devices. It seems that the backlight has just the one setting, with only a slight difference between it being on and off. The viewing angle is about what I expected from a $60 device. The on screen keyboard is a little difficult to use, but that’s a result of the screen being tall and narrow, so it’s not worth complaining about.

All in all, it’s not bad. I’d say that it rates better than any of the other cheap Android PMPs I’ve looked at. I plan to post a review next weekend.

Specs