Anthony finds out how much tablet you can get for less than £80
Finding a cheap tablet is easy. They're everywhere, from e-shops to high-street stores. But they're not without their problems. Buying an unbranded Chinese-made device, for example, is obviously a risky business. And the Kindle Fire, on sale (at time of writing) for just £40, might be from a recognisable name, but's inevitably geared towards selling you Amazon stuff, and it lacks the Google Play store out of the box.
For a while, the Tesco Hudle was the one to beat, but since it's no longer in production, there seems to be a gap for a reliable, low-price tablet with access to Google Play. Can the ZenPad С 7.0 from Asus fill that void?
Starting with the screen, you get a 7" IPS display with a resolution of 1024 x 600. That's the same resolution as the Kindle Fire but quite a bit less than even the original Hudl (1400 x 900) and much less than the 1920 x 1200 of the Hudl 2. Of course, the Hudl 2 was £20 more expensive than Asus's effort, but at £30 more than the Kindle Fire, the С 7.0's display, although perfectly serviceable, seems a tad disappointing. The 170dpi pixel density is low enough that text has a slightly fuzzy edge to it, but it's not overly noticeable, and both videos and photos look good, with the backlight topping out at a comfortable level.
As you navigate your way around the ZenPad С 7.0, a couple of things are immediately noticeable. For a start, there's the operating system. Although it's running Android 5.0.2 (Lollipop), what you actually see is the Asus ZenUi launcher. This is a fast, attractive and intuitive launcher (one that's also available for free from the Play store for any phone or tablet), and the quad-core Intel Atom x3-C3200 64-bit processor keeps up well when you're swiping through menus, home screen spaces and so on.
Interestingly, we couldn't find the clock speed of the processor listed anywhere in the specs list, but using the Geekbench app, we discovered it to be just 900MHz. This, along with the 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage and MaLi-450 MP4 GPU, isn't particularly surprising in a cheap tablet, and it's worth bearing in mind that clock speed isn't everything. However, we did experience some lag with certain tasks. Tested with Need for Speed No Limits, we found it took a painfully long time to load up a race, and the game was a jerky mess. Clearly, this tablet is not meant for high-end gaming, and its multi-core Geekbench score of 896 confirms that.
There was also some lag when opening the camera app, and the cameras themselves are unfortunately another reminder of the С 7.0's low-cost nature. The rear snapper is just 2MP, while the front one is a paltry 0.3MP. Yes, this tablet is cheap, and this is the same kind of quality as the Kindle Fire, but considering it costs twice as much, the front camera especially should have been better.
It would have also been favourable to have support for 5GHz AC wi-fi, but instead you're limited to 2.5GHz, with N-class wireless being the best you're going to get.
On the plus side, you do get 5GB of free online Asus storage, 100GB of Google Drive space for two years, anti-fingerprint coating on the screen, DTS HD sound, aptX support for high-quality Bluetooth audio and some decent Asus software for tweaking the display and audio.
Ultimately, the ZenPad С 7.0's shortcomings are mostly unimportant for what it's designed for: browsing the web and playing the odd casual game. The price, meanwhile, isn't bad at all, because the Hudl is gone and Amazon's prices are in no way the norm - plus the С 7.0 doesn't push you toward Amazon products every five seconds.
What we do object to is the amount of Asus apps that come pre-installed. Although some of them are genuinely useful (and others not so much), we'd have liked the option to remove them, but at best you can disable them, meaning you'll never get back the space they take up.
If you can put up with them, though, and you're willing to limit your expectations, the ZenPad С 7.0 is a decent and fairly well-priced entry into the low-price tablet sector. Anthony Enticknap
Not outstanding, but not bad at all.