[2011] Huawei IDEOS S7 Slim Enter the tablet market

As is the case with HTC’s Flyer, the S7 Slim is a 7" tablet, providing a lot more screen than a smartphone but without going overboard in size. It also allows for both Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, with the option to make phone calls, albeit via speakerphone or headset.


Specs
• Google Android 2.2.2
• 7" screen, 480 x 800
• 1 GHZ Snapdragon processor, 512 MB RAM
• 500 g, 200 × 109 × 12 mm
• 4 GB + microSD



Some restrictions
It looks like entry-level tablets are bound by the same restrictions as entry-level smartphones, namely a drop in screen quality and slower processing. For example, pixel count on the S7 Slim is 480 x 800 pixels compared to the Flyer’s denser 600 x 1024 pixels, while you also have 256K colours instead of 16 million as on the iPad 2. That said, the S7 Slim offers an enjoyable browsing experience. The tablet also makes use of Qualcomm’s 1 GHz Snapdragon QSD8250 processor, but was not as zippy as we expected, most notable when going through large pictures.

Doing the operating is Android 2.2 (Froyo) and once you get past Huawei’s user interface and start populating the screens with your own apps, it starts getting fun. Reading books, browsing the net and playing the occasional bout of Angry Birds can quickly become an addictive habit.

Personally we’ve found that we simply don’t make that much use of tablets’ photo or video capturing capabilities, which on the Huawei are not so strong anyways. But we would have liked to have seen better video playback support on the device, seeing that it cannot play popular .avi or .mkv files.

Conclusion
Although the review may sound a bit critical, it’s not meant to deter potential buyers. As is the case with smartphones, the Huawei IDEOS S7 Slim does what you want it to. It is available from MTN at R179 on MTN Anytime 100 with 150 MB of data for 12 months.

Posted by Radians at Thursday, June 02, 2011