Look no further for maximum entertainment as it’s time to grab the all new 7 inch Reliance 3G Tab. Armed with the Android 2.3 OS & Reliance 3G's superior IP network, your world of internet, multimedia & entertainment is surely about to change. It’s small, it’s fast, it’s portable & it’s everything you need to keep a tab on your life. The future is surely a thing of the past.
Good build quality; Well-priced; Great battery performance; Can make phone calls.
No 720p playback; Lacklustre speakers; Poor Camera, Slightly sluggish at times.
Sensing a tablet fad, Chinese hardware vendors are flooding the market with ultra low cost Android tablets, many of which cost well under Rs 10,000. However, use one of them for five minutes and you’d know that your money’s gone down the drain. Most of these tablets have resistive displays, low memory coupled with weak processors and the poorest quality of plastic you can imagine. It was but obvious, that these thoughts crossed my mind when RCom announced its 3G Tab manufactured by ZTE for Rs 12,999. While the Reliance 3G Tab cannot compete with high-end tablets like the iPad 2, XOOM and Galaxy Tab 750, can it create a niche for itself? Read on to find out…
HARDWARE/APPEARANCE
From the front, the Reliance 3G Tab is very similar to Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab. In fact, almost everyone who saw it assumed it was the Galaxy Tab. Of course, the Reliance version does not look or feel as polished as Samsung’s with its pseudo-metal finish plastic back, but that would be least of my concerns for the price I’m paying. Having said that, it looks and feels much refined than the OlivePad, which also made its debut with the Galaxy Tab. The OlivePad can still be found with some retailers selling for as much as Rs 15,000!
On the hardware front, the Reliance 3G Tab has a 7-inch WVGA display (800×480 pixels), 512 MB of RAM, an 800 MHz processor and dual cameras (2.0 MP rear, VGA front). The touchscreen interface is not as smooth as that found on higher-end tablets but someone who has not used an iPad or a Motorola/Samsung Android tablet won’t be able to find any lag or fluidity. Which, is a great feat for a tablet at this price. Under the rear cover is a massive 3,300 mAh battery and a SIM card slot. As expected, the tablet is network locked and can only be used with an RCom SIM card. The two cameras are nothing worth writing home about and are there merely as a hygiene feature.
SOFTWARE
I have always preferred Android tablets running on Gingerbread (Android 2.3.4) than Honeycomb (Android 3.0), the tablet optimized version as there are simply more apps available and the controls are intuitive. Hopefully, this would change over time but at the moment I desist tabs running on Honeycomb unless they have a customized UI and some interesting services. Thankfully, the Reliance 3G Tab runs on Gingerbread with a slightly customized UI. The customization is minimal, limited mostly to the swipe screen unlocker and minor changes to the app menu layout, which would please purists. It supports Wi-Fi hotspot feature and most apps found on the Android Market run on it. And yes, you can make voice calls too.
PERFORMANCE/CONCLUSION
The Reliance Tab 3G is among the most usable tablets out there priced below Rs 15,000. It does not promise the sky and mostly delivers what it claims. I used it for about two hours a day for web browsing and playing a few games and the battery lasted me for the entire week and still had juice to go on. RCom’s 3G network is fantastic and I regularly got a minimum of 1.75 Mbps download speed wherever I went. The tablet does have a tendency to heat up on continuous usage, but that can be overlooked in this case. At this point of time, I cannot think of a better tablet at under Rs 15,000. It is a perfect tablet for browsing the web, accessing emails and having some basic Android apps that do not need raw processing power (Angry Birds works just fine, if you were wondering). RCom also has some good 3G plans to go along with the tab, which makes it more enticing.
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