What kind of tablet will $99 buy you in 2013?
Andrew Cunningham
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Two-and-a-half years ago, we
reviewed
a tablet called the Maylong M-150. It was a $99 Android tablet sold exclusively at Walgreens, and there is a word for the people who spent their hard-earned money on it: "rubes."
We (without hyperbole) called the Maylong M-150 the "worst gadget ever," but the times have changed. Android has improved by leaps and bounds, hardware has become both faster and cheaper, and the Nexus 7 (still one of our all-time favorite Android tablets) starts at a mere $199. When Hisense announced its $99 Sero 7 Lite tablet alongside its Nexus 7-esque $149 Sero 7 Pro a couple of weeks back (a separate review is forthcoming), we figured it was time to revisit this price point to see what, if anything, had changed.
Can Benjamin Franklin buy you a good tablet in 2013? We'll run the Sero 7 Lite through the wringer to find out.
Body and build quality: Feels a little better than $99
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The smooth, brown, plastic back of the Sero 7 Lite isn't as nice as the soft, grippy plastic of the Nexus 7. It's still not terrible, though.
Andrew Cunningham
Specs at a glance: Hisense Sero 7 Lite
Screen
1024×600 7" (170 ppi) 5-point capacitive touchscreen
OS
Android 4.1.1 "Jelly Bean"
CPU
1.6GHz dual-core Rockchip RK3066
RAM
1GB
GPU
Quad-core ARM Mali 400
Storage
4GB NAND flash (expandable via microSD)
Networking
802.11b/g/n
Ports
Micro USB, mini HDMI, headphones, microSD
Size
7.87" x 4.80" x 0.41" (200 x 122 x 10.5 mm)
Weight
0.73 lbs (330g)
Battery
3400 mAh
Starting price
$99
Other perks
Power adapter
Warranty
One year
The Sero 7 Lite doesn't have the build quality of something like the Nexus 7 or Kindle Fire, but it's not as bad as I was expecting. It's got an all-plastic back and a glass front, and relatively thick black bezels surround its 7-inch touchscreen. The tablet is very slightly larger in height and width than the Nexus 7 (7.87" by 4.80" by 0.41" compared to 7.81" by 4.72" by 0.41"), but the two weigh basically the same (0.73 pounds for the Sero and 0.75 for the Nexus).
The brownish plastic back of the tablet actually doesn't feel too bad to hold—it lacks the slightly rubberized, grippy texture of something like the Nexus 7, but it's reasonably sturdy for the price. It does flex a bit if you press on it, especially toward the middle where the Hisense logo is, but the construction and the heft of the tablet are much better than I was expecting.
That said, when the tablet is in active use, the top of it can get pretty toasty—not hot enough to be in any way dangerous, but certainly warm enough to make the tablet smell faintly of burnt plastic. It doesn't inspire a ton of confidence, but since the tablet didn't burn my apartment down I'm willing to describe it as a minor annoyance rather than a deal breaker.
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The microSD card slot and mini HDMI port are two things the Nexus doesn't have. The micro USB port and the headphone jack are up there too, as well as a hard-reset pinhole.
Andrew Cunningham
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The tablet's power button and volume rocker are on the left side of the tablet, the opposite of the Nexus 7.
Andrew Cunningham
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That the single, rear-facing speaker is both tinny and quiet should surprise no one.
Andrew Cunningham
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The 0.3MP front-facing camera in the tablet's upper-left corner.
Andrew Cunningham
All of the Sero 7 Lite's ports are lined up across the top of the tablet, and it actually comes with a couple of things that the Nexus lacks. The first is a microSD card slot, which can expand the tablet's paltry 4GB of internal storage by up to 32GB. The second is a mini HDMI port, which supports 1080p and 720p at 50 and 60Hz (576p at 50Hz and 480p at 60Hz are also available options). You can choose the HDMI output resolution manually in the tablet's settings, along with overscan settings.
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Otherwise, the tablet doesn't come with many perks, and even things we would consider "bare necessities" are pretty perfunctory. There isn't a rear-facing camera, but the 0.3MP front-facing camera should suffice for video chatting and (grainy, low-res) selfies. The single, rear-facing speaker is quiet and has absolutely no bass worthy of the name. However, the tablet's microphone worked perfectly well with Google Now and the sound quality out of the headphone jack isn't any worse than my Nexus 7.
The screen: Definitely looks like $99
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The Sero 7 Lite (left) compared to the Nexus 7 (right). The Nexus 7 has a higher resolution, better contrast, and more vibrant colors.
Andrew Cunningham
The body of the tablet isn't the height of quality, but the screen is where you're really losing out. For starters, it's a 7-inch 1024×600 display with 170 pixels-per-inch, which you'll definitely notice in a world where screens with
200
,
300
, or even
400
PPI are becoming the norm. The bigger problem by far is image quality: the display is very cool (in the blue sense, not the
Fonzie
sense), colors are washed-out, the contrast ratio is low, and all of these problems are exacerbated by shallow viewing angles.
In fact, it's hard to find
anything
nice to say about the display, other than it's a five-point capacitive touch affair that seems reasonably responsive and accurate (the Maylong used a resistive touchscreen instead, which is much less pleasant to interact with). Everything on it looks cloudy and bluish, and the contrast ratio is so poor that it makes the pixel density look worse than it actually is. Allow me to demonstrate using a fi
rst-generation Kindle Fire, which also has a 7-inch 1024×600 display.Those of you with long memories may recall that we
rooted this Fire last year
to demonstrate how Amazon's Android fork was holding its hardware back. We took it out of mothballs and re-flashed it with the RC4 build of CyanogenMod 10.1 so we could run some of the same apps on it and the Sero 7 Lite side-by-side.
Let's look at the screen of our rooted 2011 Kindle Fire, which has the same size and pixel density as the Sero 7 Lite. This is a zoomed-in picture of the Twitter app at max brightness—look at the L in "sequel" and note that it's made with one vertical line of black pixels and one vertical line of grey pixels. Also note the T in "to," most of which is made from two columns of almost-black pixels.
Andrew Cunningham
The exact same shot of the Sero 7 Lite's screen at max brightness. Look at the L—the black column of pixels is visible, but the grey column almost fades into the "white" of the background. The T is very nearly blurred into obscurity. The blurriness of text caused by the low pixel density is made worse by poor contrast.
Andrew Cunningham
The two screens share exactly the same resolutions and pixel densities, but text looks even worse and blurrier on the Sero 7 Lite. The contrast ratio on the screen is so bad that Android's font smoothing makes those fonts look worse in many apps—the subtle grey edges added to the letters bleed too much into white and black backgrounds. In general, it's also difficult to distinguish different shades of black or grey from one another, which may cause additional problems in some applications.
Finally, the glass that covers the front of the tablet lacks any sort of oleophobic, fingerprint-resistant coating. The tablet's screen quickly becomes a smudgy mess over the course of just a couple of hours, and those smudges prove difficult to get rid of.
The screen is usable, but it irritates my eyes a little to read text on it for extended periods of time. It's a poor screen, plain and simple, and it's the biggest reason to spring for a more expensive tablet.
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The software: 10-inch UI, 7-inch screen
Let's start with the good stuff: the Sero 7 Lite is running a largely bloatware-free, stock version of Android 4.1.1 with full access to the Google Play store, Google Now, and all of that version of Android's other major features. There are a few pre-installed apps, most of them borne of the tablet's Wal-Mart exclusivity: the Vudu video player app, Sam's Club and Wal-Mart apps, the AccuWeather Plus app, and a copy of the (free)
Kingsoft Office
suite. Otherwise, pretty much everything is stock; stock e-mail app, stock browser, stock fonts and icons.
That a $99 tablet wouldn't come with Android 4.2 when most major companies' products still don't is not surprising, but that it doesn't at least come with Android 4.1.2 and its various bug fixes is a little odd. Even more odd is that the tablet doesn't use the purpose-built 7-inch tablet interface introduced by Jelly Bean and the Nexus 7, but the "old-style" 10-inch tablet layout introduced by the Motorola Xoom and Android 3.0. The Xoom retained this interface in
its Android 4.1 update
, but the
Nexus 10
and
Android 4.2
swapped it out for something more consistent with the phone and 7-inch interfaces.
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The Sero 7 Lite uses the "old-style" Android tablet layout. The four corners of the screen, going clockwise from the upper-left: the Google search button, the app drawer, the notification center/system tray, and the nav buttons.
Andrew Cunningham
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The Nexus 7 and Android 4.1 introduced a new Android tablet layout optimized for 7-inch screens. It sticks quite a bit closer to the established Android phone layout: nav buttons centered at the bottom, the app drawer in the dock, and notifications up top. It also fits two more rows' worth of icons, where the Sero 7 wastes space.
Andrew Cunningham
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Using a third-party launcher like Nova Launcher, you can reclaim this wasted screen space on the Sero 7.
Andrew Cunningham
As someone used to the Nexus 7, I realize that my preference for the "phone-like" 7-inch tablet layout may be a matter of personal taste. That said, it's difficult to overlook how much screen real estate the layout wastes, especially while in portrait mode—enough for at least two full rows of application icons. The old 10-inch interface was always a bit more functional in landscape mode, but in portrait mode (the way I hold 7- and 8-inch tablets most of the time) you're not making the best use of the screen.
This observation extends to some of the applications, which try to use a layout and spacing intended for a 10-inch tablet on a 7-inch screen and just end up looking cramped. We pulled up the Settings and Gmail apps to demonstrate what we mean.
The "7-inch" Gmail app, top, makes more room for your labels and things on the left. Squeezing the "10-inch" interface onto a 7-inch screen, bottom, often results in text wrapping.
Andrew Cunningham
The "7-inch" settings screen, top, presents all the top level settings options to you. Tapping any of them takes you into another subscreen. The "10-inch" interface, bottom, squeezes the top-level settings and the subscreens onto the display at the same time, which looks cramped on a small display.
Andrew Cunningham
Alternate launchers can help with some of these problems—with a little tweaking, I was able to get Nova Launcher to give me a Nexus 7-esque look-and-feel on the tablet's home screen, though the notifications and system settings were still on the bottom of the screen instead of the top and applications that try to use their "10-inch" layouts were still problematic. Again, it really comes down to what you're used to—if, as I do, you prefer the 7-inch Android layout as introduced in Jelly Bean on the Nexus 7, the "old-style" layout on the Sero 7 Lite is going to drive you a little crazy.
