Sumvision Cyclone Astro+ 7" Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) WiFi Capacitive Multi-Touch Touch Screen Tablet - 16GB

I'll get the bad points out of the way first. The white back panel has become slightly creaky after a few days heavy use. There's no bluetooth or GPS (although you can add a 3G dongle). The Micro SD card slot is difficult to access with a tiny card and large hands, and occasionally the tablet can run a little slow. I doubt it would handle the more taxing applications, but these are my only complaints, and to be honest at this price, these are small niggles to complain about.

I spotted this tablet PC on a competitor website and the price was so low it felt almost criminal not to take a punt. The reviews for the device were also extremely favourable, so I decided to have a go.

Apart from the niggles I mentioned, this tablet is astounding value for money. There's 8GB installed internal memory which is plenty for general use. You can store quite a few films on there or plenty of MP3s. You can also put in a 32GB micro SD card (Sandisk ones can be found for peanuts on Amazon), which would give you 40GB of space, which I think for general use would be more than sufficient. The operating system is Google Android, and having never used it before I've found it to be very intuitive, and makes good use of the tablet's functions. You can alter the orientation of the tablet PC, and it flips the screen round to match (just like the iPad).

The tablet's screen is also capacitive, which means that it's multitouch and it allows you to zoom in on stuff, such as a geographical area in Google Earth.

As the tablet is running on the latest Google Android, there aren't any crashing problems that were reported on this tablet supporting earlier versions of Android. You've also got access to all the usual wealth of Android apps through Google Play.

Video and audio playback is faultless, and some excellent free video applications are available on Google Play, altough the Super HD application already installed is good enough and it has a great interface for viewing photos.

Although this is a budget tablet, it genuinely doesn't feel like one, and if I'm being honest, I'd much rather pay this amount of money and then upgrade later, rather than the £349+ you would need to pay for a more market leading brand, only to find I'd have to spend the same amount of money again when the new version comes out.

I've barely used my normal desktop PC for any general stuff since I bought this. I can take care of all my email, internet surfing and gaming on this machine. It won't replace my desktop PC for HDRi photography or web development, but for everything else I need to do day-to-day, this tablet does everything I need.

I bought an "open box" Astro+, meaning it was even cheaper than normal. Sure, it's a cheap device, and there are a few signs of that - but if you want something which works, does what it should, and does it well, this is fine. It has quite a large bezel, meaning the device is physically a bit bigger than you might expect. Hopefully that translates to good battery life.

First off, I ran a SunSpider benchmark. It's one of the most commonly used tests for Android hardware. The result was 6715ms (the lower the number the better). That's a bit quicker than the original iPad was when it was launched. Sure, the newest iPad is much faster, and even an iPad2 completes the test in 2000ms. But then, Apple are still asking £329 for an iPad 2 - I could have had six Astro+ for that. Again, for some context and comparison, when the original Samsung Galaxy Tab launched just under two years ago (for £500), PC Pro commented "SunSpider JavaScript benchmark completed in a snappy seven seconds. [...]. More recently, the Tab 2 (7inch, same as this), scored 2235. And cost £199. And the Nexus 7 - among the new generation of "cheap" tablets, scored 1779. So over 3 times as quick. So you could spend £150 odd and get something better. But this was far enough away from £150 for me to think it worth checking out. So far, I'm pleased I did.

But enough tech speak. There's a few basics we need to cover.
(a) This device includes Google Play (formerly the Android Marketplace). Most of the sub-£100 don't. It's a definite bonus.
(b) It plays HD Youtube clips without any problem.
(c) It plays BBC iPlayer TV just fine (the Android app doesn't seem to offer HD).
(d) Google Maps works just fine - scrolling around a redrawing is really responsive.
(e) There's a micro SD slot, so you can increase storage.
(f) There's a camera above the screen, for video calls. But it's only a very poor sensor (VGA, I think).
(g) There's an HDMI port, so you can use it to play stuff on your TV.
(h) It's Android 4.0. Most of the sub-£100 tablets are on Android 2.something. 4.0 is the tablet-specific version, and better for it.
(i) It comes with what appears to be a full version of Documents to Go (which you don't get on the Nexus 7, nor - I think - the Kindle Fire).

There are some downsides to consider. No Bluetooth, so pairing with a keyboard is more tricky. Compared to the Kindle Fire & Nexus 7, the screen is low resolution (800x480). And if either or both of those take off, there will be a host of accessories for them; there won't for this.

Verdict: I'm struggling to decide if I would pay £90 for this, or whether I'd go for a Fire or Nexus 7. I've not seen them in the flesh, but I'd probably go for the latter, probably really for the better screen (I've yet to find the Cyclone+ hesitate or appear to need more processing power; I'm sure it will sometime). But if you can find one of these at sub £70, for me that makes it worth it.

Update:
- Good: I'd not realised there are two mini-USB to standard USB converters included in the box; I think the main aim is so you can attach a USB 3G dongle (there's a list of those which are supported). I used one of the converters to attach a standard USB keyboard, which worked fine at once with no issue at all (an ICS feature, I think). Probably not that useful to attach a full-sized keyboard, but maybe a foldable USB keyboard would sometimes be useful.
- Less good: iPlayer video is pretty poor. It's watchable, or perhaps more correctly it's fine to listen to - there's no hiccups, no stuttering, but the pictures can be pretty "blocky" (not an iPlayer issue, because I tried the same stuff on an iPad and it looked fine). I think the processor is struggling to decode all the info, with the result it's pretty patchy - slightly hard to describe - it's not pixelated, but it's very low definition - if you were watching sport, for example, you'd get a really good feel for how the game is going, but I think you might struggle to spot the ball in a tennis match, or to judge if it was a fair tackle or a foul in football. That's using the iPlayer app to stream over wifi (and it's not the wifi which is the issue - same wifi used for the iPad comparative). It might be better when the BBC release an Android app which allows downloads instead of streaming. I can't currently find a way of transferring downloaded files - even the "download for portable player" downloads - because of the DRM issue. Worth noting that YouTube is fine, so it's an issue related to how the iPlayer streaming is encoded.

When I first bought my brand new Astro+ 7 tablet (from another popular online retailer, not the auction one), I was delighted with it. Didn't notice any problems with the speed, and the free games apps were enjoyed by all the family. The screen is a bit plasticky, and the aspect ratio is too wide and cannot be adjusted, but for the cheapest tablet on the market I was prepared to live with these niggles. Oh, and the App Installer program was set to Chinese or Japanese, and I can't change the language setting because I can't read Chinese/Japanese in order to navigate through the menus.
Then the crashes started.
The screen blurred to a brilliant white, then greyed out, and it froze up. Then the back panel got really hot. This happened a number of times, becoming more frequent.
I returned the tablet for a replacement. A sealed and seemingly brand-new tablet arrived, with 120 personal photos and video clips already on it from a previous owner, so it was obviously a refurb which hadn't been wiped properly.
This worked for a while, and now the same crashing fault has appeared on the new/second-hand one, so this too is about to ge back for a refund (as the vendor now has no stock left of the product and can't get the same model from SumVision.) It's less than 4 months since I bought the original. I have tried all the hard resets suggested by the vendor's support staff, but the fault persists.
By the way, Sumvision's support website is a joke. It is merely an advert for their latest products and a link to a YouTube video of how to upgrade the OS from their upgrade package. Which doesn't bear any resemblance to the package shown in the video. There is NO TECHNICAL SUPPORT available WHATSOEVER directly from SumVision. And no way to claim on their warranty, so all you can do is go back to your retailer and hope they will honour the sale of goods act without quibbling.
Identical faults on two separate units? Build quality problem or design fault. Either way, choose a different manufacturer. This one is rubbish.