This 7" Android tablet was a bit of an impulse buy for my son. Price including EMS shipping was $US219 ($NZ297) from Eletroworld via Aliexpress. The main reason for choosing it was the 800x600 screen resolution for web browsing and book reading, and the promise of decent media playback.
At only 428g it still feels heavier than I thought it would. The screen looks nice, very clear and bright, and the 4:3 aspect ratio is good for reading. The resistive touchscreen takes a lot of getting used to after using a capacitive screen on a phone, you really need to use the stylus as a lot of finger-presses won't register (unless you have very pointy fingers perhaps!).
It is running Android 2.1. It has unlicensed versions of all the main Google apps, and whatever they have done to pre-hack the market app seems to work as I haven't had any problems downloading from the Market. This may be broken by future market changes of course. There wasn't a Youtube app but a 2.1 version I downloaded works fine including full-screen.
Smartq have left the disk partitioning the same as for their other dual-boot Android/Linux models, so there is only about 300MB in the Android partition with about 52MB free to install applications, and the rest of the 2GB NAND is just sitting there unused. There are some hacks to use the extra space but I haven't bothered with them for now.
Rooting is trivial as adb shell runs as root, so you can just copy the correct su executable over using adb. Wifi is fine, with average range and speed. The USB port is supposed to have an OTG feature for connecting external drives etc but this is disabled for some reason. The microphone is also not working.
There is 256MB RAM of which 157MB is available for the kernel (rest is mapped to hardware) and with no apps running there's about 64MB free.
Video playback is borderline, it can playback some 1080p MKVs but the sound sync is terrible, and some MKVs don't play at all. Even on AVIs the sound is very slightly out of sync. Rockplayer can play non-HD MP4 AVIs with reasonable sync though.
Simpler games like Doodle Jump work, Angry Birds runs but has whited-out overlay graphics in some places (this is a problem on some phones too apparently). Gameboid works, the Wiimote input works but is a bit laggy in some games. Quadrant crashes on the 3D tests but some OpenGL demos work so the Mali GPU is running, but has a buggy driver presumably.
So overall I probably wouldn't buy it again - I'm sure there will be at least 7 better 7" tablets released next week - but it's not too bad for the money. There is even a 3G version for another $50 or so if you're feeling really adventurous.
