HOMEVizio Tablet VTAB1008 (Wi-Fi) Review
Saturday, October 15, 2011
1
komentar
DesignMeasuring 6.6 by 8.1 by .48 inches, the Vizio Tablet is much squarer than most other tablets. Between the 8-inch screen and the tablet’s 4:3 aspect ratio, it’s wide enough to be useful in either orientation, unlike 16:10 Android tablets which are effectively useless in portrait mode. The only real downside is that the keyboard is hard to use with your thumbs while holding the tablet in portrait mode—you’ll want to put it down and type on it more than you would with a 16:10 device.
Android and AppsYou’d never know it to look at it, but Android 2.3 “Gingerbread,” which is optimized for phones, not tablets, powers the Vizio tablet. Vizio has a line of TVs that run apps called Vizio Internet Apps, and Vizio went out of its way to customize Android so it would look and feel like those apps. That’s why it’s not really a problem that the Vizio Tablet isn't running Honeycomb, the tablet-specific version of Android. The OS doesn't look like its been stretched to fill a larger screen. It does have Android's classic problem of having too few tablet-friendly apps, but phone-optimized apps at least look slightly better on an 8-inch screen than a 10.1-incher. (Vizio does claim that it’s working on a Honeycomb upgrade, but no release date has been announced.)
The pre-installed Remote Control app is, by a country mile, the hallmark app and feature of the Vizio Tablet. There’s an IR blaster inside the tablet, which works with the Remote Control app to become a universal remote for all your home theater devices. Setup requires that you know the model number for every device you want to control, but once you do it’s a cinch to figure out—just point and tap. You can organize devices by rooms, and switch between them easily. The integration and level of control varies by device and manufacturer—the tablet works best with Vizio TVs, and will be deeply integrated with a Google TV-based line of Vizio TVs coming out soon, but for most devices it offers necessary controls.
When you first turn on the device, there’s no indication of how to unlock it until you touch the screen, which is bizarre, but since most people’s instinct is to touch the screen anyway, it’s not a huge deal. The lock screen has a ton of information on it, notifications and much more; having that all at a glance, without even unlocking the device, was nice.
One thing you’ll notice when you unlock the tablet is that the home screen is just the app drawer. When you go Home, you go to a grid of your device’s apps, split into two sections: one for categories like Favorites and Games, which you can manage manually; and All Apps, which is, well, all your apps. At the bottom are shortcuts to the Browser, Email, Market, Gallery, and Music apps. These are non-customized version of the apps, which have a totally different aesthetic from the rest of the Vizio tablet; the difference is a little jarring. They also don't look great on the larger screen. If you want widgets, they’re accessible in an app called Widget Board.
There aren’t a ton of pre-installed apps, mercifully. You have the Google standards: Browser, Calculator, Calendar, Camera, Clock, Contacts, Downloads, Email, Gallery, Gmail, Google Search, Latitude, Maps, Market, Music, Navigation, News & Weather, Places, Settings, Talk, and YouTube. Vizio adds to that list a Nook app (for ebook reading), Remote Control, User Manual (a manual for the Vizio Tablet), and the aforementioned Widget Board. There’s also access to the Android Market, where you can get at all 200,000-plus Android apps (like Flash, which the tablet supports), as well as Hulu Plus, which is currently only supported by the Vizio Tablet.
The Android software itself is full of little flourishes—when you tap a button, before anything happens it glows and animates. That’s all well and good, and it’s a cute novelty for about ten minutes, but I quickly hated how much it slowed down using the device. It didn’t make the device itself slow, it just made every single action take two seconds longer because every time I pressed a button or swiped a screen, it had to do its pretty thing before it could take me where I wanted to go. You can turn off some of these animations in the Settings menu, but not as many as I wanted to be rid of.
In addition, there were a number of times the device lagged heavily, or just crashed. At two different points, the app launcher itself crashed—when the app launcher is the home screen, you’re pretty much out of luck when it crashes. In general, the Vizio Tablet just took a beat to do almost anything, or to respond to button presses. It only lagged significantly a couple of times, but over time it just started to feel not up to its tasks.
PerformanceInside the Vizio Tablet, there’s a 1GHz Marvell Armada 600 Series single-core processor. This is a generation behind the dual-core processors you're seeing in most Honeycomb tablets, and it's more suited for a phone than for a tablet. On here, it feels slow.
My experience with the tablet being slow is borne out in our performance tests. Our performance tests scored it equivalent to a low-end Android smartphone, at less than half the score of tablets like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 or the Acer Iconia Tab A100. This tablet’s not built to handle intense apps or games, and might be slower than your smartphone.
Mirroring to an HDTV was a seamless experience, though there was a significant quality degradation on the TV side. It handled Bluetooth headphones fine as well.
There is one upside to the underpowered machinery inside the Vizio Tablet: battery life is excellent. Vizio rates the Tablet at 10 hours of battery life under normal use; my tests, which involves leaving the screen and Wi-Fi on and playing a movie on a loop until the battery dies, scored the Vizio Tablet at 6 hours, 42 minutes of battery.
The Vizio Tablet gets big points for being something different, and for adding functionality—a universal remote—that’s legitimately unique in the tablet space. But the tablet simply doesn’t perform well enough to measure up to its tablet competitors. Its price is right, but it doesn't excuse its faults; the Iconia Tab A100 is the same price and works much better, and at $199 the Amazon Kindle Fire looks more compelling as well, though it's not yet available. Heck, even the Nook Color with an N2A card ($34.99, 4 stars) installed scored better on our performance tests. The price is right for the Vizio Tablet, but the tablet’s not ready for prime time.
1 komentar:
keren ni gan......
Post a Comment