ICS Runs Smoothly on Novo7

 

DocumentstoGo provides access to Word and other office documents, but this device would never pass muster in the enterprise. At the price, it's not intended to.

Under the hood lies a 1GHz Ingenic Xburst CPU, a MIPS architecture chip that powers a lot of TVs. I'm relatively new to ICS, having used it only on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, but I can tell you it looks a lot like Honeycomb.

And so it does here on the Novo7, albeit without the Face Unlock capability and Android Beam, the near-field communication-enabled data-swapping feature, both of which are highlighted in the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone.

Applications loaded with minor latency, 2 to 5 seconds depending on the application. This is not the AT&T HTC Jetstream, one of the snappiest tablets I've tested.

The tablet has a 2-megapixel rear-facing camera on the back, and only a 0.3MP VGA camera in the front. The pictures I took were subpar in quality to those from tablets with 5MP and 8MP shutters, but that's to be expected. The camera was serviceable, overall.

The tablet, whose battery life is a pleasant 8 hours, also froze. I had to reset the device by taking a pin or something of its ilk and using it to press the recessed reset button. Yikes.

If you can overlook this amateur-hour issue, and the creaking syndrome, then you might warm to this device, whose software and processing power isn't bad.

I can recommend it to anyone who is budget-conscious and wouldn't think of buying a $499-plus iPad, and who was on the fence about whether a $199 Kindle Fire was to pricey.

And I actually have a great use for something like this. I want to teach my almost 2-year-old son to use a tablet early, but I don't want him to trash my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is a bit big and unwieldy for him.

The Novo7 proved a great little tool for Angry Birds, and Sean isn't as picky about specs as his father is. This can be a great teaching tool/starter tablet for children. And that would make the Novo7 far more valuable than its $100 price tag.