Update: Advent has been in touch to tell us issues outputting sound through HDMI is down to our Sony TV. Apparently, it’s a well-known issue, with discussions all over the web. We can’t test it at the moment, since we only have Sony TVs to hand, but have you replicated it at home? Give us a shout in the comments section.
Oh, Advent Vega. It’s been a torrid love affair. While the Samsung Galaxy Tab snubbed us with its high asking price, here you were, promising scarily similar performance and specs, at less than half the cost. You’ve been playing hard to get on online stores, and come out of nowhere, winding up as one of the most anticipated gadgets of 2010 in the UK.
Now though, we’ve had a chance to test the slate out thoroughly, and cut through all the hype. Has it been worth the wait? Read our full Advent Vega review to find out.
Let’s get this clear from the start. The Advent Vega is leagues above all the other Android tablets knocking around between the £99 and £300 mark. In fact, for a small company to have put together such impressive hardware for £249 is staggering. It is however, no iPad rival, and nor does it give you the full Android experience. Are you prepared for that?
Build
As ever, the Advent Vega is far less attractive looking in real life than the press images make out. We could complain about the ever so slightly creaking build quality of the Advent Vega, but to be honest, it comes with the territory when you’re charging this little. On the plus side, the Advent Vega is still light, reasonably thin at 13.6mm and the four pads on the back should stop it from getting scuffed when placed down on a hard surface, as is always the risk with an iPad sans case.
What’s more irritating are the poorly defined physical buttons. The screen orientation lock (of which more on in a moment) really needs a nail to push and pull across, while the screen unlock button takes a whole two seconds to light up the display when pushed. Finally, there’s a physical back button, which is admittedly a nice option to have since it can sometimes vanish from offscreen.
It's not too thick, but you can feel it slightly ever so slightly depress when you grip the back
On the side, there’s a 3.5mm audio port, volume rocker, and a flap hiding slots for microSD (There’s very little internal storage so you’ll need this), a USB port and full size HDMI, all of which are relatively inoffensive. The USB port is a bit of a headscratcher, as it’s full size, but for attaching to a computer, not the other way round, so USB keyboards can’t be plugged in. In other words, you need the USB to USB cable that comes with it for sideloading media, and if you lose it, you probably won’t have a spare to hand. It’s not a big deal, but the lack of micro USB is a puzzler, especially since there’s a separate socket for charging the thing.
The real issue you’re going to have to deal with though is not so much whether you like how it feels (Cheap), but whether you like the size. Yes, the 10.1-inch screen has roughly the same diagonal width as the iPad. But it’s a different ratio, 16:9, and as a result, the Advent Vega is nearly a foot long. This has divided the Electricpig team: on the on hand, it’s great for video, but on the other, it makes webpages either very narrow, or the tablet very wide to hold and uncomfortable to type with. What do you plan on doing more of?
What’s the screen like?
Well, the good news is that the 1024×600 inch touchscreen is capacitive, which is a rarity at such a low price. It’s finger friendly, but as you probably guessed, compromises have had to be made. Viewing angles are poor, and it picks up smudges like some sort of handsome smudge womaniser.
Viewing angles aren't great, and the big dollop of glass reflection doesn't help
But if it’s just you watching a video, these issues will soon fade away, and it’s comfortable enough for reading long features on websites, though a tad too grainy to cope with for War & Peace.
A quick note about the HDMI port at this point. The good news is that it outputs the screen, not just videos from the Gallery app (We mean you, Dell Streak), and it’s full size, so you don’t need an adapter or mini HDMI cable. It’s great for playing high def videos on your TV, and while they don’t look stellar, the broad format support (See below) should make up for this. Websites, at 1024×600, look poor stretched out on a HDTV. Oddly, our Advent Vega didn’t output audio through HDMI, although this appears to be an issue with our Sony TV’s handling of HDMI sound, rather than the Advent Vega itself.
HDMI is a welcome addition
And the camera?
Look! It's me, but low resolution
Did you really expect the Advent Vega to have a useful camera, when Apple couldn’t afford to put one in the iPad? Yeah it doesn’t. The 1.3MP frontfacing web camera on the Advent Vega is absolutely awful, taking flat, soft as lard photos in natural light, and video with more stutter than a Joe song. On the plus side, it is still infinity percent more camera than the iPad has, so we can’t complain about having the option. Fring for Android is readily downloadable from the Voip’s company’s own website, and works just fine for video chats using the Advent Vega.
But it’s Android 2.2, that’s good right?
Well, on paper, yes. Android 2.2 is the latest version of Google’s mobile OS, but because the Advent Vega is a large tablet, rather than a sort-of-phone like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, there are some serious limitations.
Android 2.2 just wasn't designed for this resolution, and it shows
You see, Google hasn’t released a version of Android meant for tablets with higher screen resolutions rather than phones yet (One is coming), and so although Android’s core is open and free to use, Google hasn’t allowed Advent to install its proprietary apps like Gmail, Google Maps and the Android Market – which some might say are just as integral to Android as the underlying tech.
Some being us: while the included email app does a very good job of mimicking Gmail (and even throwing in a combined inbox for good measure) with a different colour scheme, the lack of Android Market access means that downloading apps is a hit and miss affair. You’ll have to hope an Android app is available through the developer’s website (Not always the case), or hunt out semi-legit install files from forums. Either way, that requires know how not everyone snapping up a super cheap tablet will have.
And even then it’s pot luck. Angry Birds just wouldn’t work for us, which is a good example of another issue manufacturers face when trying to shoehorn something Google really doesn’t want you to into a tablet. Samsung managed to paper over the cracks fairly well, but Advent has not.
The Advent Vega feels really rough around the edges: Android 2.2 isn’t meant to run at 1024×600, something that becomes startlingly clear when you pull down the notification bar. The tray takes up the whole screen, but the notifications only take up as much as they would on your phone. It looks nasty, and the issues continue in the apps you use. Advent’s software skin and fixed task bar at the top for the Advent Vega appears to shunt the bottom of some apps off the screen. We found Spotify in particular suffered, as the Now Playing tray is almost invisible.
The keyboard is well spaced and repsonsive, bar a strange bug
The Advent Vega also froze completely twice during our testing, requiring a hard reset (which you can do by holding down the power button), and the screen orientation lock switch sometimes decided to simply not work, and go ahead and tilt the screen anyway, which was most peculiar.
Speaking of the software skin, we’re not especially taken with Advent’s design choices for the homescreen either. Putting the home, menu and back buttons at the top of the screen is a wise move compared to opting for physical buttons on something so big, but the dock at the bottom is not. You can’t change it, so you’re stuck with web shortcuts (Not apps) for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all day. On the plus side though, Advent hasn’t bogged the Vega down with bloatware (One WH Smith ebook download app, and that’s it).
Can I go off piste though?
In a word, yes. The Advent Vega has been rooted and hacked wide open, so if you know the forums to hit up and understand how Android really works, it’s possible to sideload Android Market, and as a result, all the other core Google apps, on it.
But, this isn’t something that’ll sit well with the warranty, and more to the point, not something that everyone who just wants a cheap tablet for web browsing will be able to do – let’s face it, some people will want one because they don’t understand computers. As such, we have to mark the Advent Vega down for lacking Google support – hopefully Google’s tablet-optimized Android 3.0 (or Honeycomb) will bring an end to the big G’s tablet dashing restrictions.
What’s it good at out of the box?
We’ve been breaking this down Bisto style for you, and saving the best until last. Core Android 2.2 still keeps most of the improvements you’ve seen on Froyo phones, like speed improvements, a PIN screen unlock instead of stupid shape keys, and Flash video.
Flash video playback works incredibly smoothly
The browsing experience on the Advent Vega, for the price, is excellent. Pinch to zoom gestures don’t look smooth but do work, and the browser loads pages terrifically fast. In fact, the Advent Vega consistently loaded the Electricpig.co.uk homepage quicker than an iPad by several seconds, we found.
The screen length might still bug people who prefer to read in portrait (it’s very narrow as a result), but that 16:9 ratio is a big boon for Flash video. The Advent Vega comes preloaded with the Flash 10.1 plugin, and it works very smoothly indeed. BBC iPlayer ran without a glimpse of a stutter, and desktop YouTube does too (up to 480p resolution – 720, not so much), so you can watch TV shows easily.
The stock Android touchscreen keyboard meanwhile does not have a good reputation, but stretched to 10-inches, it generally works just fine, and you can type as quickly on it as on an iPad. We weren’t alone in noticing a strange glitch that caused a letter to be repeated (Ttthannkss), but this only kicked in rarely, and we’d hope Advent will be fairly quick ironing this one out.
Video too
720p MP4 clips play flawlessly on the Advent Vega
The Advent Vega turned out to be a superb media player too. Sound quality from the speaker is no worse than the iPad’s, and its video format support is much stronger. It’ll play DivX files, standard definition MKVs and best of all, high def MP4 files, without a stutter, so you won’t have to resort to RockPlayer to open your videos (we tried the same files through it, and it didn’t work very well on the Advent Vega). We’ve been waiting for Tegra 2 tablets for a long time, but now they’re here, it appears the performance has been worth the wait.
Battery life
The Samsung Galaxy Tab Android tablet could last a day on full pelt, which is nothing compared to the staggering stamina of the iPad’s battery. What’s becoming increasingly clear though is that the size difference (7 to 10-inches diagonally) allows for a much more capacious battery: the Advent Vega runs like the clappers.
We used it for a whole day with WiFi on, watching videos (local and Flash), surfing the web and streaming music from Spotify, and only got the charge down to fifty percent. Admittedly, we’d say it’s not quite as powersipping as an iPad on standby – it dropped another ten percent overnight where an iPad might drop one or two – but in day to day use running low on power will rarely be an issue.
Verdict
This is an internet tablet first and foremost
It should be clear by now that the Advent Vega is more of an internet tablet than it is an Android tablet. The truth is that unless you know how to root an Android phone, and that an APK isn’t a finishing move in wrestling, trying to get Android apps running on it is simply pot luck, and until Google lifts its limitations, will remain so. If you’re all about the apps though, you should seriously consider the upsell: £180 more will get you an iPad. That’s a lot, but the iPad is worth every penny.
But what an internet tablet the Advent Vega is. The Advent Vega is fast, efficient, and incredibly well specced for the price. So long as you’re clear about this, you’ll love this device.
