The Bottom Line
If you are not afraid of buying from an unknown manufacturer, and your requirements and expectations aren't high, then this Prontotec tablet justifies its price tag. It is not a premium quality device, has its own strengths and weaknesses, and considering its low price, one can't expect more from it. However, if you are afraid of buying from an unknown manufacturer, then Amazon Kindle Fire HD which needs no introduction is a much better deal.
Read full review...What You Will Like...
- Decent performance due to dual core processor
- Can be used as phone by inserting SIM card in TF card slot
- Good value for money
- Comes with Google Play app store
- Dual camera
- HDMI port
What You Won't Like...
- No bluetooth
- Poor build quality
- Poor battery life
- Comparatively bulky
| Prontotec PT7-A8-A Tablet | |
|---|---|
| Read User Reviews | |
| Overall Rating | |
| Manufacturer | Prontotec |
| Operating System | Android 4.2 Jelly Bean |
From an unknown manufacturer, the Prontotec PT7-A8-A is yet another entry level tablet. Having a tempting price of around $65, it is a 7 inch tablet which is powered by a dual core processor and much newer Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system. Lets see how it stacks up against the competition and find out its strength and weaknesses in this prontotec tablet review. But, before you start reading the review, take a note that the packaging includes user manual, charger, USB cable, OTG cable and obviously the tablet itself.
Design & Build
The Prontotec PT7-A8-A tablet measuring 0.37 inches in thickness and weighing 14.4 ounces is both heavy and thick when compared to 0.30 inches thickness and 9.1 ounces of weight against the similarly priced Dragon Touch DT Y88 by TabletExpress. Though the way it is curved around the top and bottom side, it does give a pleasing appeal when holding the device. But, this is soon taken away because of its weight. Other that that, the front of the device has a black bezel running across the entire 7 inch display, with 0.3 MP front facing camera placed on the top right corner. However, the bezel on one side is slightly more, this is probably done to accommodate the front facing camera. Talking about the placement of buttons, and ports — the volume rocker and power button are both placed on top right side while the micro USB port, HDMI port, micro SD card slot, 3.5mm headphone jack are placed on its right. The availability of a reset button also makes things bit easier, in case, you have lost your password.
About the build quality of this Prontotec tablet, the less you talk about is better. The moment you hold it in your hands, you know why it is priced so low. The tablet is cheaply built using plastic and you can easily imagine it break, if it accidentally slips out of your hands hitting the surface hard. This is the reason why we highly suggest you to get Squaretrade accidental protection which will only cost you few dollars extra — here it will be $9.99 for 1 Year. But, the peace of mind it will bring justifies this extra investment. Alternatively, you can also buy a protective case to protect it from damages.
Display & Audio
The multi touch capacitive display of this Prontotec tablet measuring 7 inch diagonally have screen resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. The viewing angles of the display aren’t very best, which can become a problem when viewing videos with other person sitting next to you. Moreover, if you are used to touch screen of premium device, like that of iPad, you may not find the touch screen to be very responsive. However, with continuous usage, adjusting to the responsiveness of this touch screen isn’t very difficult. Overall, the display is of average quality, somewhat, you can expect from a device priced this low.
The Prontotec PT7-A8-A has a single speaker, which is placed on its back side. And, as far as the sound quality coming from the speaker is concerned, it is average, nothing, extra ordinary. The audio output from the speaker is audible, but, when used in noisy environment, the speaker are not clearly audible. In such cases, the 3.5mm stereo headphone jack is a real life saver. Using a decent quality headphone can take movie watching and music listening experience to a whole new level.
Hardware & Performance
Powering this $65 tablet is an Allwinner A20 dual core Cortex A8 processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, and 512MB DDR3 RAM. The availability of only 512MB RAM makes multi tasking a little bit difficult. But, for most of the light to moderate usage, the Prontotec PT7-A8-A tablet does well. Like when browsing web, playing games like Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds, Subway Surfers, etc., the tablet performance is decent. However, for power users, this tablet is certainly not a good choice.
Operating System & Apps
The Prontotec PT7-A8-A tablet comes with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean operating system and has Google Play Store app store pre-installed. It has native support for most of the popular file formats — like MP4, AVI, MKV, 3GP, RMVB, RM video file formats, MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC audio file formats, JPG, BMP, PNG, GIF picture file formats, and TXT, PDF ebook file formats. However, it doesn’t come with any office apps pre-installed. But, this can easily be fixed by downloading Quickoffice which is a free android app from Google Play Store.
Since, it has flash pre-installed, therefore, watching videos on video sharing sites like YouTube is very much possible. Also, for those who are concerned with how well Netflix and Skype works in this device, then, they will be pleased to know, that both of them works fine with acceptable audio and video.
Camera
This Prontotec tablet has 0.3MP front facing and a 2.0MP rear camera. The front camera despite being a low resolution camera does well while doing video chat. But, the rear camera produces low quality pictures and videos, which is expected due to its low resolution. The rear camera records videos in VGA mode at up to 30 fps. Not good, if seen by today’s standard. But, this can be seen as a way how manufacturer has managed to reduce its price. Overall, until the main purpose is not to take high quality photographs, you will find the rear camera okay and handy.
Storage Space
The Prontotec PT7-A8-A comes with only 4GB of internal storage. It is considerably low as only around 2GB is usable, while rest of the storage is taken up by operating system files, and pre-installed apps. The micro SD card slot present in the tablet certainly provides bit of relief as it supports micro SD card of up to 32 GB. So, getting a micro SD card is not a bad choice along with this Prontotec tablet. This way apps can easily be installed in the micro SD card, freeing up the internal storage for optimum performance. Even depending on the storage capacity of memory card, plenty of data like pictures, movies, eBooks, can easily be stored.
Battery Life
The Prontotec PT7-A8-A has 2500mAh battery which claims to give battery backup of around 3 hours. Under normal usage, you can expect the battery to last for around 2 hours. So, for some of you, the battery life might be an issue specially those who travels a lot, and planning to use it while travelling.