Lava ETab Z7H: ET Review

NEW DELHI: This budget tablet from Lava is impressive, thanks to the high quality finish. The 7-inch tablet feels sturdy and has a matte finish that keeps fingerprints at bay while providing a better grip. A weave design on the edges of the front panel gives the tablet a premium look and feel. The 7-inch capacitive touchscreen has bright vivid colors and is responsive. However, the screen resolution is just like any other budget tablet; 800 x 480 pixels.

The slim design of the tablet comes at a cost. The volume and power keys are too slim for comfortable use. The bigger sacrifice is when it comes to ports — there is no full size USB and even HDMI connectivity is missing — a major drawback as most budget tablets offer HDMI.

The Android 4.0 user interface is customised with large icons. The lock screen displays five last accessed applications and you can quickly launch any of those directly from the lock screen itself. Some of the preloaded multimedia apps include Flipkart’s Flyte music store, 3 months of free multimedia content from Hungama and educational content from Meritnation and McGraw Hill — these contribute to a great out-of-the-box experience.

Performance wise, the ETab is similar to other budget tablets. It includes a 1.2Ghz processor with 512MB RAM and 4GB internal storage. It is good for day-to-day usage that includes browsing, basic games, social networking and multimedia usage. However, if there are too many apps running in the background it tends to become sluggish — an issue with most budget tablets.

Lava bundles a microUSB to USB adapter in the price and thanks to USB on-thego support, it can be used to access content stored on flash drives.

Multimedia performance was fantastic across the board — it played 720p HD videos without any issue and the speaker output was loud enough to use it for music playback in a small cabin. The front VGA camera, like many other budget tablets, takes images with lot of noise even in ample light.

Battery life is just over three hours on continuous video playback. Lava has tried to bank on the low price for the tablet, but the lack of ports and average battery life ruins the price advantage. For just a bit more, you can consider Karbonn’s Smart Tab 1.

It has similar specifications and offers excellent build quality, HDMI port, bigger battery and the latest Android 4.1.