I’ve just bought a 7″ Onix tablet from Aldi. It runs Android 4.0.4, has a 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU, 512M of RAM, 16G of flash storage, and a 800*480 display. They are selling rapidly and I don’t know how long they will last – probably you could get a returned one next week if you can’t get one today. But if you like pink then you may be able to get one (the black ones are selling out first).
The tablet seems like a nice piece of hardware, solid construction and it feels nice to hold. Mine has a minor screen defect, but that’s the sort of
thing you expect from a cheap device, apart from that the display is good.
The Wifi doesn’t seem to have as good a range as some other devices (such as my phones and the more expensive 10″ tablet I got from Kogan). This isn’t a
problem for me (the data intensive uses for this device will be in the same room as the AP) but could be a killer for some people. If you have your phone or a dedicated 3G Wifi AP in your pocket while using the tablet then it should be fine, but if you have an AP at the wrong end of your house then you could be in trouble. I found Youtube unusable due to slow downloading even when sitting next to my AP but I can play videos downloaded from iView that are on my local web server (which is more important to me). I expect that I will be able to play local copies of TED talks too.
The camera is bad by phone camera standards, fortunately I have no interest in using a tablet as a camera.
I had no real problems with the Google Play store (something that caused problems for some users of an earlier Aldi Android tablet). Generally the tablet works well.
The people who build Android for modern devices seem remarkably stupid when it comes to partitioning, every device I’ve seen has only a small fraction of the storage usable for apps. This tablet is the worst I’ve ever seen, it has 16G of storage of which there is 512M partitioned for apps of which only 400M is free when you first get the device! It comes pre-installed with outdated versions of the Facebook client and Google Maps (which isn’t very useful on a Wifi device) and some other useless things. If you upgrade them to the latest versions then you’ll probably lose another 100M of the 512M! Fortunately the Android feature to run apps from the VFAT partition works so I haven’t been prevented from doing anything by this problem yet.
In conclusion, it’s not the greatest Android tablet. But you don’t expect a great tablet for $100. What I hoped for was a somewhat low spec tablet that works reasonably well and that’s what I got. I’m happy.
