Help
My Android experience is limited to a couple of smartphones that I've owned, but I wanted to give some impressions of the Rock X800 tablets (2) that my family now owns, and maybe get a couple of questions out there.
Again - all impressions are after 1 week of use, so it's still quite early.
First: Build quality seems to be very good, comparable to anything that would be purchased retail from a mainstream brand. Everything worked just fine out of the box, and (aside from my rather embarrassing "screen bubbles" question in this forum...
), everything has been perfect.Wifi is fine for my needs. You can see where it isn't as strong as some other devices, but I am able to use the tablets anywhere in my house with a centrally located Wifi router. The longest is 1.5 stories up and through one tiled and one carpeted floor - maybe 3.5 meters in straight distance - and it gives 2 bars of signal.
My children (8 and 10 years old) have installed a dozen or more little games found on the Play store, and all have worked fine except for the Furby application, which freezes at the "This works best in portrait mode" screen, which appears to be a common issue in that app. From watching, most have been fairly simple 2D games, though there have been one or two 3D games that have played fine with no discernible lag.
Screen, to me, seems very good. It isn't quite as bright as my mother-in-law's very expensive iPad2, but in my opinion, it's wonderful. I've watched a couple of videos on it and the quality is excellent. Touch response is fine as well. I've never had a recognition issue with keyboard input.
Camera quality is middling. Dual 2MP cameras do help, though I wouldn't expect extreme results. Frankly, I wouldn't think that would be anyone's primary focus.
They are fine for things like video chat. Microphone quality seems fine - only testing I've done is the "speech to text" input, and it recognized my speech without any issues beyond what you would expect from the app.Battery life is a little short, but I don't have specific measurements to offer you. My kids can play games on them for 3-4 hours and not run out of battery, though at the end of the day, the battery tends to be around 20-30% remaining. For me, getting 5 hours of tablet usage without a recharge is plenty (my kids better not let me catch them playing that often once school begins again
), but for some people, I could see the battery being a little weak. I have wifi and bluetooth on all the time, by the way.All in all, I think this is a very good tablet. 8" is a good size IMO, and everything has worked exactly as I'd hoped it would work. I was nervous, as this was my first China Tab, straight from Shenzen, but everything was very good so far.
I do have two questions:
The tablet came with a lot of Chinese language stuff. I did change the main language to English (Settings-Languag&Input-Language), but all of the weather-related information (etc) on the first screen and everything like that has Chinese characters all over it. It'd be nice to know how to change that to English - is that even possible? It's not the end of the world, as I just have the children go into the "all applications" screen and choose from there, but it'd be nice to change.
Second: Can anyone recommend a case that might offer a little bit of protection for these? My vendor did include a couple of very basic universal cases, but they wouldn't even come close to holding a tablet in there. As I mentioned, I do have a couple of kids, and the inevitable drop or two will happen - I'd like to give the tablets at least a small chance of survival.
Thanks everyone! I hope everyone has the very best of happiness and success in the New Year.
