The Tightwad Test – Just How Useable is a $99 Tablet?

When HP decided to pull the pin on their promising TouchPad tablet, it lead to some extraordinary events. Faced with warehouses full of virtually valueless stock, HP gave retailers permission to slash the price of their WebOS powered devices. The fire sale lead to long queues outside electrical retailers all around the world as word spread on Twitter and the link-sharing sites that the $99  was now the sort of bargain you simply couldn’t ignore. Within about 24 hours all the units had been sold and thousands of people regretted not hearing about it sooner.

The TouchPad debacle lead to increased interest in budget tablets and soon the social networks were abuzz with news of another tablet which, while it was nowhere near as good, still represented excellent value for money. Here in Australia the ZTE9 tablet was being sold by local mobile telco Optus as the MyTab for $99AUD with a 6Gb data package. Within about 36 hours all stocks of the tablet had gone and all retailers both high street and online had sold out. As a Mac and iPhone using geek, I was interested in finding out just what use a $99 tablet is, so I picked one up from electrical retail chain Dick Smiths via their online store. With postage and packing it cost me the grand total of $129. Two days later I took delivery of my cheapo tablet and started to take it through its paces.

First Impressions

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this device, it has a 7″ resistive touchscreen display, stock Google Android 2.1 ROM, tri-band UMTS, quad band GSM, Bluetooth 2, GPS, stereo headset support, a 3 mega pixel camera, FM Radio, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, a 2GB microSD memory expandable to 32GB and a 3400mAh Li-ion battery. It’s a pretty amazing feature list for such a cheap device.

The packaging that came with the MyTab contained a charger, a USB cable, a couple of small booklets, the Optus sim card and, of course, the device itself. Having charged it up for the first time, I activated the sim card and was soon up and running. I knew that the Android devices were closely connected with Google’s cloud-based services, but was still impressed by just how much my Gmail log-in opened up for me with minimal effort. Within about 10 minutes I had Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs and Google+ all up and running and syncing data to my devices. It was a great start.

Never having used a resistive touchscreen display I wasn’t sure what to expect from the device, but I will admit to being distinctly underwhelmed by the responsiveness of the unit. I’m so used to gliding a finger gently across glass with my iPhone 4, that the physical pushing and prodding required to manipulate a resistive display took me by surprise. It’s not the most responsive interface I’ve ever used and the feeling of dragging your index finger around the plasticy coating seemed very primitive to me. Sometimes, in order to activate icon placement on the home-screens, you have to literally stab your finger into the screen to get it to wake up and it’s all too easy to lose focus at the screen edges and drop the icon.

Having had a poke around with the supplied apps, I decided it was time to install something myself and fired up the Android Market. I downloaded a couple of RSS news readers and was surprised that I was almost immediately being given low memory messages. Surely I had more space to play with than that? This thing had a 2Gb data card in it and the apps I’d just installed were only a couple of hundred Kb in size. What was going on? I hit the forums and soon had my answer – turned out that the ZTE9 had appallingly limited on-board memory and you could easily use it all without installing or running any extra apps at all. The solution, according to the forums, was to partition the datacard and install an app called Link2SD which enables you to shift memory hogging apps and system services onto the external memory card. It seemed like a lot of hassle for an issue that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

I left the low memory issue for the time-being, shut down all the extra services and apps I wasn’t using and took a few of the default apps for a spin. After trying the Facebook, Twitter, Skype and Pulse apps I accepted that, just as I’d known would be the case, $99 doesn’t buy you a lot of processing horsepower. This thing was slooooooow, slow to open apps and sluggish to use them. Typing status updates in the Facebook app was painful with the keyboard lagging well behind my key-presses. Pulse took ages to open and flicking between news threads was like looking at a slideshow. All things considered, it was a pretty depressing start to my relationship with the MyTab – using it after an iPhone 4 was like getting out of an Aston Martin DB6 and driving off in a SmartCar. And yes, I realise that it’s not entirely fair to compare the two devices, but the reality is that I’d grown used to the amazing retina display and swift functionality of iOS and it was a rude awakening using Android on a budget device with a very low resolution display.

One thing that did impress me about the MyTab was its battery life. I had the thing switched on and in active use with wi-fi running and after a couple of days I still had 75% battery charge. I also began to accept the limitations of the hardware and try and work with it. I got TuneIn Radio running well and updated to SMS Pro for the messaging. I found myself using the tablet for my email – installing the amazing Swype keyboard made responding to messages quick and easy.

All things being equal I still found using the MyTab to be a frustrating experience. Above all, those incessant low memory error messages made installing and using apps a painful experience. If I’d stuck with the default installation of the MyTab with its Android 2.1 OS there’s little doubt that I’d have written off the $99 as a bad investment and added it to my shelf of lonely cast-offs. However the great thing about Android is the community around it and the chance to hack this device into something a little more useable.

Hack to the future

While investigating the low memory issues on the MyTab I discovered that ZTE had released an updated ROM for the device based on Android 2.2. I downloaded it and installed it and was immediately impressed by the improvements over the stock 2.1 install. It was faster now and much more responsive and while the low memory messages had not disappeared, they were greatly reduced. I’d go as far as saying that had the unit come with 2.2 installed on it from the get-go I’d have been a much happier camper. And it was only while browsing web forums that I discovered that the update existed at all – Optus, the mobile telco, whose name adorned the MyTab made no reference to it on their site.

The next step was to root the device so that I could start using Apps2SD and Link2SD to free up some of that valuable memory space. This process was outlined in great detail on the excellent Whirlpool forums. I carefully followed the steps and within ten minutes had a fully functional rooted device. I began moving apps onto the external memory and was delighted to be able to install lots of new apps to increased the utility of the device.

The same Whirlpool forums also had a long thread about updating further to Gingerbread (2.3.5). I read over 50 pages of responses from MyTab owners who’d tried this – some had managed to brick their units, but the ones who’d updated were extremely impressed by the performance improvements. I decided to give the upgrade a go. Again I carefully followed the (excellent) guide step-by-step and about an hour later had successfully installed the Cyanogen Mod (based on 2.3.5) and an overclockable kernel. It was a tricky procedure, but as long as you follow the steps to the letter, it will work fine.

The great news is that the Cyanogen Mod transforms the MyTab from a barely functional tablet good for little more than serving as a glorified eBook reader, into a versatile device capable of running most Android apps with ease. For starters, the 2.3.5 version of Android is light years ahead of the stock 2.1 you get with the device. It’s functional, user-friendly, powerful and a real joy to use.

However Cyanogen does much more than simply serve up 2.3.5 – it enables you to overclock if you wish. I installed one of the overclockable kernels and this has enabled me to really ramp up the speed of the device. After a process of elimination (work your way up through the different CPU speeds until you find the highest one that’s most stable) I got the MyTab running happily at a maximum frequency of 748Mhz. Some users on the forums have got their devices running faster, but it’s not a given.

The combination of installing Cyanogen and overclocking has transformed the MyTab from a $99 paperweight into a genuinely useful Android tablet. Sure there’s still the issue of that shonky resistive touchscreen, but overclocked and without the lag, it’s much less noticeable and a lot more useable. I can now run even demanding Android apps (such as games) without issue. The only downside to overclocking is that battery life is reduced, but even with the CPU running hot, I can easily get several days of use out of the MyTab before it needs a recharge.

Conclusions

When I first got the MyTab I was disappointed with it. I wondered what all those people who’d raved about the device were going on about. However once I’d got rid of the awful stock ROM supplied by the telco and overclocked the device, my opinion changed.

No, this is not an iPad – nor was it ever meant to be. It’s about as low-end as tablets get and if, like me, you come from using much higher spec’d and higher priced devices, then you have to be prepared to make concessions. What has surprised me is how few concessions I’ve actually had to make, now that the operating system is up to date and the CPU’s being pushed hard.

So what uses can you (realistically) put a $99 tablet to. Any cloud-based activity, such as email, web browsing, Facebook or Google+ is fine. Using the device as an eBook is great because it has a long battery life and with good eBook software (I recommend Mantano Reader) you get correctly rendered text that’s easy on the eye. Keeping up with news via RSS feeds or closed-wall news apps like Pulse is fine too. Games may be problematic – Angry Birds is fine, but you may find frame rates a bit lacking on action games such as first-person shooters. Watching video is fine, as long as you encode it correctly and use a decent player, such as MoboPlayer.

If you’re looking for a bargain basement tablet then the ZTE9 comes highly recommended, but only if you’re prepared to root and update the device to the Cyanogen Mod. As supplied it’s a very poor product that would infuriate even the most forgiving user, but with Gingerbread running on it and with the kernel overclocked, it’s a far different machine. Best $99 I’ve spent in a while.