Sunday, 19 June 2016

iRULU X1S 7" Android tablet


Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good budget tablet



This tablet was sent to me for review.  It is pretty basic, but it does the basics well.  It has quite a lot of limitations but it's well made and costs less than thirty quid.  You're not going to get brilliant specs at this price and it's not intended as a high-end, primary device but as a backup or for a young child.  It's fine for this.  So far at least, I've had no problems with reliability, it seems robustly made and everything works; I don't think you can ask for much more from a tablet at this price.

The tablet is nicely packaged in a decent cardboard box. In it, you get the tablet itself, a USB-to-pin lead for charging and a micro-USB lead which can also be used for charging and for data transfer. There is also a good instruction booklet which will be extremely handy for anyone unfamiliar with Android.

[Switching on for the first time, I got a short sequence of screens to set date & time, connect to wi-fi (which didn't work) and sign-in to my iRULU account (which I don't have).  If you get these, just skip all of them, restart and you get the normal Android start-up sequence, which all worked smoothly for me.]

The tablet is reasonably slim and light, so I find it comfortable to use.  The screen isn't great; the definition is OK but not brilliant and it is very intolerant of tilting so that viewing even at a small angle causes significant loss of picture quality.  Treated carefully, though, it's perfectly usable.

The tablet runs Android 4.4.2.  It has modest memory capacity: 8GB hard drive and 512MB RAM.  These are adequate for ordinary use and you can expand the memory with a microSD card up to 32GB (not supplied).  The small RAM does cause some problems – you can't do many things at once.  You may well find other limitations if you use memory-hungry apps or games but for basic use it's pretty reliable.  (Note that it doesn't have Bluetooth.)

There are plenty of good things about this tablet:
- Wi-fi connection is easy and solid
- Apps installed quickly and without problems
- Net browsing is OK, if a little slow sometimes
- Video streaming from YouTube etc. is good
- Email is fine
- Music quality is excellent through an external speaker or headphones, either wired or via Bluetooth.  The built-in speakers are pretty terrible

It also has some poorer aspects:
- the battery life is poor (3 hours max) although it holds fairly well on standby
- No Bluetooth
- small RAM which limits some usage
- low quality cameras (2mp rear and 0.3mp front)

Overall, this is very good for what it is: a very basic tablet with fairly low specs but which works.  If you want something for higher-end use this won't be for you, but as a backup or first tablet for a young person, for example, I can recommend this.

Amazon page HERE

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