ProntoTec A8 7 Inch Android Tablet Review – Under $50 , Playstation emulation, Netflix, Web Browsing

They’Ve got on the Amazon store, and this is actually now about 40. This week on sale, usually it’s like 60 or 70. But right now you can pick it up for 40 bucks. This is basic transportation, so as you’re watching this remember we’re talking about a 40 tablet, so it’s not going to have all of the features you’re going to have in a 200 tablet, but it is certainly usable, especially if you know what you’re getting into so let’s Check out the hardware, a pretty lightweight it’s got a power plug here. It doesn’t come with the power adapter, but you can get one and then you could charge it and also use a USB OTG devices. At the same time, it does have an OTG cable. Here. I believe the Y cable will work with it also, so you could charge it and use USB devices with it simultaneously. You have a headphone microphone jack here, a reset button and then a little SD card slot here, a micro SD card slot that goes on the bottom that’s it for ports, it’s, pretty basic, again basic transportation. Here you have a rear camera with VGA resolution, so kind of SD resolution. It is capable of capturing frames at 30 frames per second. The front camera also has a similar resolution, but you do get a little flash on there. So you can, you know, use that as a flashlight or use it to take pictures too, so pretty cool there.

Now the display is not very high resolution, in fact it’s 800 by 480, so it’s very, very low res, but that’s really all you need on something. This is inexpensive. You don’t get a lot of storage space or ram on here either. I has 512 Meg’s of RAM and about 4 gigs of flash storage. So again, this is yeah, something that you’re gon na get for a kid or somebody doesn’t need to do a lot with their tablet. You know just kind of basic web browsing or that sort of thing chrome is of course installable on it and you can get in and use it. The viewing angles on the screen are actually better when you are in landscape mode, then, when you’re in portrait modes. Here so I’ll show you how this looks here, so you can of course flip it around. Like so it’s got a dual core processor at 1.5 gigahertz cortex a8. I believe so it is pretty speedy and what you can do here is just flip it around and you’ll see. The viewing angle is better in landscape than it is in portrait mode. So that’s one thing to keep in mind: the performance actually isn’t bad and what’s. Interesting is about a year ago, one of the first inexpensive tablets I looked at was from Excel. This is there pronto tech line and the quality is a lot better than it was a year ago. So the cost of the components is going down.

So they’re able to put better components into the device, so you know, like you see there you could, you can browse the web. You can do some light emulation. I would say like the limit to what you can do with it it’s kind of get into the PlayStation 1 era of gaming. So I found that, like things like the Nintendo, 64 emulator really aren’t. You know you really can’t run fast enough on here. Probably a combination of RAM and processor you can, you can get the recast, a Dreamcast emulator to run on it, but it’s really slow, so you’re not gon na get much use out of that. But PlayStation 1 works fine. I would say anything from like the ps1 backwards, not counting the n64 should be able to work just fine when it comes up in the PlayStation 1 emulator. Actually works really well on here. So that is pretty good to see so let’s take a look and see how the struction Derby 2 runs on it all right here we are running Destruction: Derby, 2. This is a PlayStation 1 game being emulated on the device and, as you can see, it runs very fast. So this kind of gives you an idea of kind of the the things that you can do with this kind of processor in this kind of RAM. So certainly not I’m gon na get you again into the Dreamcast era or the PlayStation 2 ear, or something like that.

But you can do some basic emulation. A lot of the 8 and 16 bit game. Emulators will work just fine on it, so that is pretty nice to see again out of a 40 right now tablets, so not a bad price there. You can also do things like you know, watch Netflix and do some basic stuff like that as well. So we’ll pop into Netflix, real, quick and maybe pop open, a quick movie, so you can see how it kind of responds and it’s not bad. I mean you know you can certainly get faster stuff out there if you want to pay more, but it’s certainly definitely watchable here. So let me scroll through all the stuff here that my daughter’s been watching. Maybe we’ll use our tried and true Star Trek movie here and just play that real, quick and see how that pops up and I did find it’s a pretty decent viewing experience the battery life on this isn’t great, so you’re gon na get you maybe three or Four hours of battery life out of it once it’s, you know under load, but if you, you know, keep it plugged in while you’re watching or something it should work pretty. Well, you don’t have the ability to use HDMI or any kind of display output on it. It does support, mirror casting and that sort of thing, if you want to get into that – which you could do, of course, but it’s not gon na, allow you to plug it into a TV very easily.

But, as you can see, you know what Netflix works. It can load up a movie and it actually is playing at a you know at a decent, watchable framerate, so not too bad. There let’s see what else we can pop into real quick before we’re done. I will not load up a modern Android game here. Also so you can kind of get a feel for how that works. Now, game controllers will work through the USB port, but this does not have bluetooth so you’re not going to be able to use any kind of wireless controllers with it. This is a castle of illusion, which is the remake of that Sega Genesis Classic with Mickey Mouse, and this actually runs pretty decently. It takes sometimes a little bit of coaxing to get it up and running because even sometimes it’s a reboot the system. You only have again 512 Meg’s of RAM a lot of newer Android devices that these games are being targeted to are kind of focusing on. You know higher end hardware with more RAM available, but it does keep up with a pretty decent framerate it’s a little bit slower than I saw, unlike my Tegra 4 tablet that I also play with so you know not as as snappy perhaps, but this is really Playable and I think for any kid looking for some really light gaming like this, it should work fine I’m sure some of those other older tablet games will work as pretty well also over time.

You’Re, probably gon na see less modern games. Work with tablets like this, mainly because they’re gon na need more RAM and they’re demanding more from the devices, but you know for 40 or 50 dollars. This is a really good way to do basic tablet kinds of tasks. You can tap on an article in The New York Times and read it so you can do a lot of basic web browsing. I actually use these sometimes at work, because we do some data entry and we want to be able to do that very quickly via a web browser and we’ve got Wi Fi, where we’re at so you can buy a bunch of these. You can buy really. Four of these for the cost of one name brand tablet and get your people working without a lot of aggravation and headaches because it does web browsing and really you know some of those lighter android data entry kinds of apps and be something you’ve written custom. For your institution or company will all run really well on this thing, because it runs just about every Android app you throw at it that can live within its memory requirements, so really good for that sort of thing, great for kids that might lose them or whatever. If you lose a 40 or 50 dollar tablet, it’s, not like losing an iPad or something that costs a lot more so great. For that, I would like to see some Bluetooth connectivity on these, because it’ll certainly give you some options for keyboards and game controllers, and that sort of thing, but beyond that this is a pretty good buy, especially if you have the proper expectations going in.