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Review: The Ematic eGlide 4 Proves There is Such a Thing as Too Cheap

I’ve been running this blog for over 2 years now and today I am reminded about one thing I’ve learned in that time. I sometimes need weeks to understand the nuances of a device and post a review, while with other devices the review gels in the first few minutes of use. The eGlide 4 definitely falls in the latter category.

This tablet was announced by Ematic (a tablet maker that I’ve reviewed a bunch of times) last week. It caught a lot of attention because it was selling for $80, making it the cheapest Android 4.0 tablet that a lot of  blogs had seen. It has specs like many sub-$100 tablets, including a 7″ capacitive touchscreen, 1GHZ CPU, 4GB storage, microSD card slot, Wifi, and more.

I ordered one the day I heard about it, and it arrived on Saturday. I played with it Monday afternoon, and I immediately knew that I wouldn’t wish this tablet on anyone.

I normally like to take a week to post a review. This usually gives me enough time to really get a good idea of how well a device works and identify its quirks.  But in this case I don’t have to do that. The eGlide 4 has an overwhelming flaw that moves it directly to my "don’t buy" list.

It is laggy to a degree that I have not seen in years. The responsiveness of this tablet is not poor so much as it is terrible beyond belief. It takes a long time to load apps, the apps take a long time to load levels, and even simply opening the app menu takes longer than I like. It takes so long to respond to my touching the screen that I was having flashbacks to the original Pandigital Novel. Yes, it truly is that bad.

I can confidently say that this one of the 2 worst tablets I have seen this year, and I’m pretty sure it edges out the Coby 7033 that I reviewed a couple months back. At least that tablet didn’t have this lag.

There comes a point where cutting corners on quality in order to reduce cost becomes a very bad thing. And with this tablet I can confidently state that the extra $10 to $20 that you would spend to get another tablet is entirely worth it.

 Specs

  • Android 4.0
  • 1GHz CPU
  • 7″ capacitive touchscreen (800×480)
  • 4GB Flash storage (2GB accessible by user)
  • micro SD card slot
  • g-sensor
  • Wifi
  • USB Host
  • HDMI out

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Comments


Mike Cane August 7, 2012 um 8:16 am

Did you contact them to find out if this was its normal behavior? What CPU is inside? Does it have a GPU? What’s the screen res? You left out the damn basics.

Nate Hoffelder August 7, 2012 um 8:18 am

It’s an $80 tablet. What do you think the screen resolution is?

And who would I contact? The only people I know are the marketing folks and they’re marketing folks. In this case their job would be to blunt my effectiveness.


fjtorres August 7, 2012 um 8:52 am

That kind of lag suggests they went with cheap slow flash storage and/or very slow DRAM.


Andrew August 9, 2012 um 10:45 am

As someone who recently gave the ultra cheap Idolian TouchTab 10 ($189, 10.1″ Android 4.0) a try, I can confidently say this: spend the extra money on a better quality tablet. Idolian tablets are ten times better than Ematic and other cheap Android tablets, but that really isn’t saying much. The TouchTab10 was very quick and response with almost no lag when downloading or opening apps, but the screen resolution was so horrible, it actually gave me a headache and made me feel motion sick. Look at the screen resolution of this device, 800 x 480. That is much to grainy to do any serious e-reading or web-browsing for my (or anyone’s) eyes. The TouchTab 10 had similar issues. Smaller images look totally blurred out, and text is torturous to read. Just save up another $100 and buy the Nexus 7, or wait to see what the Kindle Fire 2 is like (or the fabled iPad Mini).


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