A Tablet for under £50 ~ Inspect-a-Gadget

I was meant to review a tablet for under £50 for Travel Supermarket's Inspect-A-Gadget Competition, but it all went a bit wrong at first, so my review is finally here and so is my tablet!

We were given the choice of 5 different travel gadgets under £50 to review and we went for the tablet as we've never had one that the grown ups and little boys could use (previously it's only been a couple of our teenagers who had their own tablets), we thought it'd be an excellent thing. The tablet we chose has the impressively long name "7" inch Touch Screen Allwinner A13 1.0GHz CPU Android 4.0 Tablet PC 4GB HDD 512MB WiFi" which cost £40 including postage.

I ordered from Amazon, choosing purple from a huge range of available colours, delivery was really quick, and all was going swimmingly until after about 12 hours use my tablet screen suddenly turned blue and then it stopped working. Boo hoo. 

The children were gutted as they had already decided it was the best thing ever. We'd linked it to our wireless and my Google account, loaded a couple of Lego Duplo games onto it (plus the infamous Candy Crush) and the little boys had even watched a couple of BBC iPlayer programmes.

I got in touch with the seller and tried factory resets, but the problem seemed to be that the screen had failed and they were happy to replace it, but I would have to post my tablet to them at my cost before they sent a replacement.

So we sent it and we waited for 1 week....my 3  year old repeatedly asked if he could 'play with the tablet' and I'm pretty certain believes we took it off him because he was naughty in some way!

Hurrah! Today the postman brought our new tablet and everyone is delighted. It's taken about 10 minutes to get another screen protector on it, attach it to a Google account, download a Simpsons game and get everyone smiling. This tablet is much more sensitive and speedy than the previous one and the colours are much brighter, so I am happy to assume we were just unlucky and at first had a tablet that wasn't quite right from manufacture. 

We love it. If I had any inkling that I could buy a tablet so cheaply then I would definitely have bought one earlier as it stops my children asking to play games on my phone! It's going to be absolutely fantastic for when we're camping, especially when were trying to set up and pack away, as this is the time when the little ones get 'in the way' or just tend to wander off or be mischevious because they are bored.

Because we have 5 teenagers our 2 little ones have a good understanding of screens and games and want to join in, and I wouldn't be happy to let them play with something that I simply cannot afford to replace, nor is it ideal they use gadgets belonging to their bigger siblings. Although they are supervised accidents will always happen, and frankly if I'd paid £150 or more for a tablet I'd be reluctant to let any of my lot touch it!

It's small enough to fit in my handbag, but has a nice big screen with a really wide angle of vision, so 3 people can sit together watching something and all can see the picture just fine. It has a full touch screen and motion sensors so,  for example, when playing a driving game you can 'steer' by tilting the tablet and it has a headphone socket (thankfully) so that the user doesn't drown out conversations going on around them. The only real downsides are that the battery life is not great, I think around 3 hours play and it's flat, but as long a you expect that then it isn't as issue and the tablet has no means of charging from a USB, in fact the supplied mains charging cable is incredibly cheap and flimsy.

I paid £35.50 plus £4.50 postage, so exactly £40 and for that I feel this is an incredible bargain. It isn't as durable for youngsters as an Innotab, it isn't as quick as an iPad and it doesn't have the memory or battery life of a more expensive tablet, but for £40 it's fantastic.Buying from Amazon gives you a level of protection that is at least as great as from an electrical shop, and we could have even gone through Amazon for our return and not had to pay postage (but I didn't realise that at the time) and we still have a 12 month warranty and support from within the UK.


Here are the specs -

Brand	Generic
Item Weight	599 g
Product Dimensions	23.6 x 15.6 x 7.2 cm
Item model number	A 13
Color	White
Screen Size	7 inches
Processor Brand	ARM
Processor Type	ARM710a
Processor Speed	1 GHz
Processor Count	1
RAM Size	512 MB
Computer Memory Type	DDR3 SDRAM
Hard Drive Size	4 GB
Operating System	Android 4.2.2 Jellybean ~ although we were expecting 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich from the Amazon listing information, so we were pleasantly surprised.
Average Battery Life (in hours)	3 hours
Lithium Battery Weight	40 grams

I was given the money to purchase my tablet in order to review