Advent Vega Review
Advent Vega (10.1-inch Tablet)
When Apple (iPad) dominating in the tablet market, some companies just can’t wait to jump in and claim some of the lucrative action – even when their products are not ready for release. Such is the case with the Advent Vega.
After the iPad, it’s the most talked about tablet in the UK today.Why the buzz? Simply, it’s the price – at sub-£250, this I Oin Android tablet appears a positive bargain next to Apple’s £399 iPad 2.
The Advent Vega Tablet takes the same basic form as the iPad,
then cheapens it in order to reduce the price tag. The Advent Vega Tablet has a plastic TN screen with weak colour when used face on.
When tilted by a view degrees, the screen can fade to black, becoming an unviewable mess. Resolution is comparable to the iPad’s, but at 1024 x 600 instead of 1024 x 768 pixels, the Advent Vega Tablet has taken a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio. Add in its 10.1 inch screen size specification, and you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve seen this before – this is a standard-issue netbook screen, with capacitive touch for fingertip control.Advent Vega Tablet over and we find a plastic back, gently curved at the edges, and prone to picking up scratches when placed on the desk.
Advent Vega Tablet Specs
There’s a flap on the right of that hides some useful looking connectors. First is a MicroSD card slot, with Advent throwing in a 2GB card to give basic storage. Next to that there’s an unusual full-size USB 2.0 port – an included A-to-A USB lead in the box lets you plug the Advent Vega into a PC, although we couldn’t get it to charge from it.The mains charger is a 12V power supply, which implies the Advent Vega requires more power than the 5V/0.5A available from USB 2.0.
The third option under the flap is HDMI. We tried connecting the Advent Vega to a monitor, and saw a mirrored version of what was on the tablet’s own screen. It looked to be at the same limited resolution too, with interface elements looking very pixellated. The speed of the device slowed so much it effectively became unusable.A restart of the Advent Vega tablet did not help.
On the bottom edge of the Advent Vega Tablet is some form of Apple- like dock connection port, although no cable nor explanation is included with the tablet. In contrast to most Google Android phones. The Advent Vega Tablet does not have the usual fixed Home and Back buttons on the front panel. Instead the Home and Back buttons are embedded within a modified version of the Android user interface, however, there’s a small silvered-plastic back button on the top-right.
Like ViewSonic’s ViewPad 7, the Advent Vega Tablet can’t be used in portrait mode, as the home screen user interface doesn’t rotate when you hold it upright. The Advent Vega is installed with Android 2.2 operating system, which was originally designed for mobile phones, it has the option for a plugin to give what’s optimistically called ‘Flash compatibility‘.
Flash on every mobile devices we’ve tried is, at best, very poor; at worse, useless. Interestingly, the designers must have known that Flash might be a problem, as they included a click-to-enable system like Flashblock or Click-To-Flash, such that you must finger-click some individual Flash boxes in a web page to load content.
Also absent from is the usual Google Android Market app. Without this in place, it becomes very hard to supplement the limited number of apps already installed.
Advent Vega Tablet includes a forward-facing Webcam, but as with other video it’s not a pleasant experience to use. On the whole we have mixed feelings about devices like the Advent Vega Tablet.