Hello everybody!
Perhaps it’s because of my time living near Cerritos California where Visual Land is based, or their very attentive and cool presenters at CES, but ever since January, I have been waiting to get my hands on one of Visual Land’s new tablets. And judging from the traffic on my YouTube channel, you have been too.
First some background; Visual land is a company that got their start in Personal Media Players, and it really shows in the way that they present their products. Everything on their website has a very energetic feel to it, and they are the only company that I know of who lists the Ohms and Watts of the speakers used in their devices.
Lets get started then!
Hardware
The Prestige 7 weighs in at 298g (10.5oz), 19cm x 12cm x 1cm (7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.4″). It has a 7 inch, 800×480 screen (16:9 widescreen ratio), with 5 point capacitive mutli-touch.
The tablet has 8GB of onboard storage, and is expandable through a microSD slot (will support up to 32GB). An A8 1.2GHz processor, 512 MB RAM.
It has the usual array of power button and volume rocker, along with a 3.5mm headphone jack, Mini USB (through which you can charge when connected to a computer, send data from your computer, or with the provided cable add a USB peripheral such as a flash drive), HDMI out port (you will need an HDMI C type cable), and the port for your wall charger. A speaker on the back, and a 1.3Mp front facing camera (no back camera) finish off the tablet nicely.
Software
This little tablet runs Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich, and it is ‘vanilla’. (No pun intended, but that is the term for an unmodified Operating System) As such, its software really does not set it apart. It does not have access to the Google market (play store), Perhaps in the future, that can be changed, but for the present, Amazon, GetJar, and other alternatives will have to do.
There are, at present a few hiccups with Skype. Though the camera will produce Video Over Internet, because of some miscommunication between the camera and Skype, on the other end, it has pink and green lines running through the picture. This is an issue which should be resolved in the next version of Skype, or so I am told.
Apart from this, all of the apps that I tried worked flawlessly.
Performance
This tablet is surprising in it power. Having tested out a number of 7 inch tablets I have always felt like there was a noticeable decrease in performance from their 10 inch counterparts. The Prestige 7 seems to plug along rather quickly despite its small stature.
The Average Benchmark scores for the Prestige 7 are:
- Quadrant- 1820
- Antutu- 3150
You can use these numbers to compare the Prestige 7 to other devices, and see just what I mean.
Battery Life
Two Edged Swords, that is the lesson here in tablet batteries. Visual Land opted for a battery size that allowed for quick charging, as well as charging through not only the DC jack, but also the MicroUSB port. That kind of decision sits well with me, because if I can just carry around a MicroUSB cable and not worry about lugging an extra cord, all the better. Don’t misunderstand though, the wall charger for the Prestige 7 is quite small and light.
You can expect to charge the battery from naught to full in about an hour! A bit more slowly if you leave the WiFi on when you are charging.
Here are the exact figures (all are given in percent change per hour):
- Standby -1.5%
- Netflix -45%
- YouTube -32%
- Browsing -20%
- Charge (WiFi on) +51%
- Charge (WiFi off) +82%
To be frank, the Battery life is not at all what I expected. From our tests, you can go from full to empty in nearly two hours. This is unfortunate, however I have heard that other reviewers have been getting much closer to the 8 hours advertised. So it is possible, as always that my results in this regard are not typical.
The Wind Up
Here is the final score. On the Forel-Ule scale, I would give this tablet a 17. It gets great marks in almost everything; it can hold its own in both size and form, but the battery life leaves something to be desired. All in all, it is a very affordable 4.0 tablet, with character in its design that sets it apart from the usual crowd. If you are looking for a compact and light tablet on a budget, this should be near the top of your list.