TabletExpress Dragon Touch DT Y88 Dual Core Tablet Review

Plenty of budget Android tablets have hit the market specially from the unknown manufacturers in the past year or so. Dragon Touch DT Y88 is one such tablet by TabletExpress. The Dragon Touch DT Y88, a budget 7″ Android tablet currently priced at $75 running Android 4.1 has dual core processor, mini HDMI port, 4GB flash storage, a microSD card slot, standard 7″ capacitive touch screen to lure buyers.

The device comes in nice packaging, and includes operating manual, micro USB to USB cable, OTG cable, and wall charger. Now, lets find out if this tablet is worth buying or not.

Design & Build

This Dragon Touch dual core tablet measures 7.10 x 4.80 x 0.30 inches in dimensions and weighs 9.1 ounces. Available in black color, the Dragon Touch DT Y88 features an identical design to the similarly priced FastTouch A13 tablet. The front of the tablet has a thick black bezel running around the screen which unnecessarily increase the size of the device. However, it is still quite comfortable to hold the tablet in one hand.

As far as, the placement of buttons and ports is concerned, it seems all fine. The 3.5mm headphone jack, volume rocker, and TF card slot are placed on its right. While the power button, and DC charging port, micro USB slot, mini HDMI slot are placed on top right edge.

Regarding the build quality, the moment you hold it in your hand, it doesn’t feel like you are holding something of premium quality. The device is primarily made using cheap plastic. This is justified considering its low price.

Display & Audio

The screen resolution of 7″ capacitive display is 1024×600 which is little bit better than other similarly priced tablets. The pictures appear little bit better due to this improved screen resolution. However, bad viewing angles and poor visibility in the outside light spoil this. Still, the display is quite responsive, and if bad viewing angles are removed from the equation, the display is quite better for the price.

TabletExpress Dragon Touch DT Y88 has a single speaker which is placed on its back. The speaker output is not very high quality, so, if you are into watching movies and listening music, then you will need a good pair of headphones. The headphone jack works well and stereo output from it is also good when good quality headphones are used.

Hardware & Performance

The device has iMAP X15 Dual Core processor clocked at 1.2GHz and 512MB DDR3 RAM. Despite of dual core processor, the performance is not upto the mark. It randomly freezes at times usually while doing multitaksing. This is possibly due to low RAM, thus, closing unnecessary applications before starting a new one, will not only free up RAM, but, will also significantly improves the device performance. However, if used like stated above, it runs most of the apps including games like angry birds, subway surfers, fruit ninja, candy crush etc. without any glitch.

Operating System & Apps

This Dragon Touch DT Y88 tablet by TabletExpress runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system and has native support for wide variety of file formats. The device supports the following file formats: AVI, MOV, MP4, RMVB, FLV, MKV, GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WBMP, WEBP. The support for other file formats can easily be extended by installing apps from Google Play Store which comes pre-installed on this device. Even Netflix and YouTube lovers will be pleased to know that both the apps work well in this tablet as it comes with Adobe Flash support.

Camera

This tablet has dual cameras, but, both the front facing and rear camera are of 0.3MP only. Thus, the pictures and videos taken by both the cameras lacks quality and clarity. Moreover, due to inability of the rear camera to shoot videos at high frames per second, the videos lacks fluidity along with clarity. This is, however, justified by the low price tag of this device. But, for doing video calls via Skype, the front camera works decently. Its mainly the rear camera which disappoints as it is supposed to take photographs with more clarity. After all, that is the main reason why one needs a rear camera.

Storage Space

With only 4GB of internal storage, out of which only around 2GB is available, the ability to store data and install apps is somewhat limited. The only possible solution to overcome this is to get a micro SD card along with this tablet, and use it with this tablet. The micro SD card slot present on the right side supports micro SD card of up to 32GB in size. But, if this doesn’t sound good to you, then this FastTouch tablet has 8GB of internal storage and costs similar to this Dragon Touch tablet. However, it does not have HDMI port.

Battery Life

Unlike the FastTouch A13 tablet, which has 3000mAh battery, the Dragon Touch DT Y88 Dual Core Tablet is equipped with a slightly lower capacity 2,800 mAh, 3.7V battery. But, despite of this, the battery life is impressive. On standby mode, with the display turned off, the battery lasts for days. However, under normal usage the battery lasts for around 3-4 hours. This largely depends on how the device is used, for example with WiFi turned off and brightness turned low, the battery may last even longer.