A Short Review of the Visual Land Connect Android Tablet
Many, many Android tablets have hit the market in the past year or so, including ones from truly unknown companies. This is one such tablet.
The Visual Land Connect tablet is one I happened across on Walmart, where it wa spriced right in the middle of the many $90 to $100 budget 7″ Android tablet. It has generally unremarkable specs, with the standard 7″ capacitive touchscreen, 8GB Flash storage, a microSD card slot, Wifi, g-sensor, and it is running Android 4.0 on a 1.2GHz CPU.
Verdict
This is an unremarkable tablet with average performance and adequate build quality. There’s not much to set it apart from the competition, and I feel that if you happened to grab this tablet out of a bag full of similarly priced tablets, you’d be getting neither the best nor the worst of the bunch.
The one thing that set this tablet apart (and this is why i bought it) was the 1.3MP camera. That’s much better than you would expect on a tablet in this price range and I was hoping it would be the first one to offer a decent image. Unfortunately, there seems to be a driver issue. I can’t get the installed camera app to work, and the several camera apps I downloaded from Google Play also do not work.
Battery Life
The specs on the box claim 8 hours battery life, but I didn’t get that much. I tested this on a trip, and I usually got around 4 to 5 hours of steady use. That’s okay, but it’s a little short when compared to other tablets in this price range.
Touchscreen & Performance
The touchscreen worked about as well as I expected. I suppose that might be too vague for some, but touchscreens are a solved problem for Android tablets. I’m beginning to suspect that man budget tablets get their touchscreen from the same source and are built in the same factories. That would tend to explain the general uniformity of these tablets.
Performance was also at par, and this tablet passed all my tests (Angry Birds, web browsing, Youtube) quite adequately.
What’s in the Box
The Connect tablet is specced to have USB host, but it only has just the one USB Mini-B port. Luckily the manufacturer included a converter cable so you can plug in USB accessories. The box also contains the power supply, asecond USB cable (for connecting to your PC) and earbuds. But there is no HDMI cable to go with the HDMI port.
Apps & Android Market
This tablet ships with GetJar and a link to download the Amazon Appstore, but not Android Market. Luckily I was able to install it (instructions) as well as several apps. This tablet also ships with Aldiko, YOutube, Adobe Reader, and the usual basic suite of apps. There’s enough to get you started
Specs
- 1.2GHz CPU
- Android 4.0
- 7″ (800×480) screen
- Capacitive touchscreen
- 1.3MP camera
- USB Host
- 8GB Flash
- microSD card slot
- HDMI out
- g-sensor
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