The E Fun Trendy 8

Dubai:

US company E Fun has launched its new eight-inch tablet —the nextbook Trendy 8 — a low cost device that’s good enough to watch video, listen to music, surf the Internet or read an e-book.

It is one of the thinnest in market at 9.5mm. The iPad 4 measures 9.4mm.

The tablet runs on the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system and is powered by a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.5GHz processor. They should have used the latest Jelly Bean as Android 4.2 is faster and simpler.

The Trendy has 1GB RAM and 8GB internal memory, with the option of increasing it to 32GB using the extendable micro-SD Card slot. The display has a resolution of 1024 x768 pixels and a screen ratio of 4:3.

The Trendy is made of a thick plastic. Held in landscape, all the buttons — mini-USB port, HDMI port, micro-SD slot, headphone jack and charger — are on the left of the tablet. It has a built-in 0.3MP front camera and 2MP rear camera.

Pictures taken with the rear camera are grainy and colours faded due to its low resolution and night shots are ruled out due to the lack of LED flash. Only the white balance and exposure settings can be adjusted, but panorama shots can be taken and saved in less than three seconds. E Fun must be trying to cut costs and, in any event, many people prefer to take pictures and videos with a smartphone.

Another disadvantage is that while holding the tablet in landscape mode to take pictures, it is easy to block the lens with your fingers. There is no dedicated button for taking pictures and videos and this needs to be done from the screen.

The tablet supports full HD playback but the single speaker does not have much volume and can be blocked when the tablet is held in landscape mode. You have to use the headphones if you want to enjoy audio. But, the Trendy comfortably handled playing 2D and 3D games like Drag Racing 3D.

Preloaded e-books

The Trendy can connect to other devices and the Internet with Bluetooth and WiFi. Loading pages and pinch and zoom was fast, but placing too many widgets on the home screen will cause a delay when rotating the tablet. The company has preloaded 25 books on the e-book reader and given 5GB of free cloud storage on SugarSync and OfficeSuite, apart from a bundle of software.

The battery has an average life when compared to other tablets. It lasted around eight hours when used to listen to music, watch videos, surf the Internet and email with WiFi. It is priced at Dh649.