DroidTalk: Reviewing the year 2015 for tablets ft. Asus ZenPad 8.0

We don’t buy a cheap tablet to replace our laptop unless we are willing to pay a premium for an iPad or Samsung Note Tablet or Microsoft Surface with a handsome hefty amount. We buy a cheap tablet because its great for watching Netflix/YouTube or reading ebooks on the go or something for your kid who can be allowed handle something affordable unlike a premium Apple tablet. Whatever the reason may be, there are a few things that we always pay attention to – like you want a great battery life, we want all the apps, a solid construction so that is is totally unbreakable and most of all we want a great looking screen. We got that right, no?

Some time ago getting all this under INR 15000 was not possible. We had the iPad ruling the tablet market (which is true today as well) but now we have good stuff at surprisingly affordable pricing and I’m really amazed how many cheap good tablets there are available in market by 2015. We at Install or Not had spent our time mostly with smart phones because tablets never got in our use case. Honestly the one that we still remember which definitely stands out in the category is the ASUS ZenPad 8.0 (Z380KL).

ZenPad Z380KL is definitely amongst the best affordable tablet that you can buy. This tablet is near the top of its price line but it doesn’t felt cheap at all. It has a nicely textured body and sharply rounded corners which gives the tablet a look and feel more premium than its competitors.
The Asus ZenPad 8.0 comes with voice calling capabilities as well and focuses on offering a good multimedia experience. It has a 1.4GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 (MSM8929) processor that is surprisingly fast and performs like a high end device, smooth and stutter free. The processor is coupled with 2 GB of RAM that we think may not be enough for today’s requirements on a big screen. If there are multiple processes running in background at once then whatever you are doing on screen starts skipping frames or starts lagging. Though for most part it did well and handled almost all the tasks perfectly. Paired with Adreno 405 GPU graphic intensive games like Asphalt 8: Airborne, Dead Trigger 2 and N.O.V.A 3 were handled very well by the GPU. The ZenPad flaunts an 8-inch WXGA (1280×800 pixels) LED IPS display, with Asus’ Tru2Life technology. The display is bright, vivid and viewing angles are good as well. Along with 16GB of internal storage which can be further expanded upto 128GB via micro-sd card, Asus is additionally offering 5GB Webstorage Space (their own public cloud) and 160GB on Google Drive for two years. The review unit we got was bundled with the Audio Cover, which Asus describes as an entertainment accessory that brings cinematic, 5.1-channel surround sound. This accessory costs an additional INR 3000 and it essentially adds six speakers (including a subwoofer) to the tablet.

Tablets are like tweeners, fighting for space between the superior communications capability and portability of smartphones and greater productivity of PCs. Being in the middle is not normally a desirable spot for a product, but tablets excel at information and entertainment consumption and this middle is a pretty big and happy place to be. Earlier tablets were called as Tablet PCs and most had keyboards that were physically and permanently attached. And now tablets are just larger smartphones that were simply better at displaying content on a big screen. The year 2015 saw decline in sales of standalone tablets as they cannot replace a PC. The tablet as we know it is dying. Long live the hybrid tablet!

The future of tablets seems promising in the near term since neither PCs nor smartphones can match their information and entertainment consumption experience and tablets will get better at aiding productivity. Do you agree with us? Let us know what you think the comment section is open to all.