Asus MeMO Pad 7 (ME572C)

The cheap Android tablet that's better than the Tesco Hudl 2

Asus isn’t a household name, which is a shame because the Taiwanese company makes some great products, such as top-notch Chromebooks and Windows laptops. It also made the discontinued Nexus 7 Android mini tablet, which does now at least have a spiritual successor in the shape of the MeMO Pad 7.

Like the Nexus 7, the MeMO Pad 7 (not to be confused with previous models with similar names) is a 7in Android tablet with a 1920x1200-pixel screen. Unlike the Nexus it’s not guaranteed to get the latest versions of Android, although it does come with the second most recent version (4.4 KitKat) installed. There are rumours the 5.0 Lollipop upgrade will come in May, but this is no cause for alarm because KitKat is a good operating system.

Asus has modified KitKat slightly, the most useful tweak being a mode that lets you use two apps side by side on screen. The range of compatible apps might be limited and the mode can feel cramped (this is a 7in screen, after all), but it can be useful in a pinch. Less useful are the non-customisable widgets on the lock screen and the notifications drawer, which is now cluttered with bundles of settings shortcuts (which you can at least change).

The MeMO Pad 7 is well built and - available in a variety of colours -looks attractive. Apart from a thin black rubbery strip similar to that on the Nexus 7, the rear has a glossy plastic finish. While this wasn’t as slippery as we’d feared, a more grippy, rubbery surface would have been preferable. Also, the sharp, angular corners dug into our flesh.

It’s tricky getting a firm grip on the tablet because of the narrow borders to the left and right of the screen (when held in portrait orientation). We sometimes set off onscreen controls inadvertently. The screen, though, is bright and sharp, with good colour accuracy and wide viewing angles. The touchscreen’s responsiveness was sometimes lacking, with a noticeable delay between touch and response. It’s still less laggy than the sluggish Tesco Hudl 2 though. Asus’ onscreen keyboard often also struggled to keep up, so we swapped it for an alternative and this fixed the problem.

We had no complaints about performance though - the Intel quad-core processor and 2GB of memory tore through our benchmark tests. The MeMO Pad 7 didn’t always wake from sleep instantly, unlike the vast majority of tablets, sometimes taking several seconds to kick into gear.

Battery life was very good for a mini tablet, lasting 13 hours 12 minutes write home about. The forward-facing camera is good enough for video calls, but the rear-facing five-megapixel camera produced images with washed-out colours and lots of noise, even in brightly lit conditions.

So the Asus MeMO Pad 7 isn’t perfect and these flaws are enough to prevent us from recommending it unconditionally. But it’s still a very good budget mini tablet and is certainly better than the larger, if slightly cheaper, 8in Tesco Hudl 2 because of its longer battery life and more convenient weight.

Held back by a few flaws, the latest MeMO Pad 7 is nonetheless a fine budget tablet.

SPECIFICATIONS

7in 1920x1200-pixel touchscreen • 1.83GHz Intel Atom Z3560 quad-core processor • 2GB memory • 16GB storage • Android 4.4 KitKat • 269g • 8x114x200 mm (HxWxD) • One-year warranty