The OlivePad, a tablet that was supposed to be India's first 3G tab, never quite made it big (it barely even made it to the markets). Most service providers came up with 3G plans but initially focused on mobile handsets and not tablets. Recently, with the profusion of tablet PCs in the market, carriers are not only coming up with customised 3G plans but also marketing tablets of their own. One such player is Reliance Communications that came up with the Reliance 3G Tab a few weeks ago.
Design
The Reliance 3G Tab looks compact despite its 7-inch touchscreen. However, the design of the tablet is not worth writing home about because, for starters, the bezel on the unit we received wasn't uniformly wide. There's a line-up of three touch buttons on the bottom of the bezel – ‘Settings', ‘Search' and ‘Home' – a long press of the last one throws up a two-line matrix of applications that I had recently been using.
The orientation seems optimal for reading e-books and we downloaded the Aldiko eBook Reader app to try out a few. I started with ‘White Fang' by Jack London. While the text was comfortably readable, the Tab doesn't have any multi-touch functions. So, if you want to zoom in to a text with smaller font you'll have to go all the way in to Settings and increase it. The response time on the tablet wasn't painfully slow but it was nowhere close to matching the likes of the iPad. A slight tap on either side of the screen would take you to the previous or next page of the book and a smooth scroll on the left would reduce or increase the brightness while reading. Reading the e-book on the 3G Tab turned out to be a satisfactory experience.
Fast fingers
Messaging on the Tab's virtual keyboard was relatively easy when I was holding it in the portrait mode. The thumbs just about span across the entire layout and make it comfortable to type on. Using it in the landscape mode however, was a bit of a stretch, quite literally. You have the option of choosing between the regular Android keyboard and the XT9 predictive keypad layout.
Layout
The home screen has a neat panel of five icons at the bottom that gives you access to all that you might want to do on the tablet. You have the icons for Applications, Call, Contacts, Messages and eMail in the row. The interface on the Reliance 3G Tab allows you to have a quick glance at your unread e-mails and messages when the Tab is still ‘Locked'.
Like in any other Android tablet, you'll find the familiar cluster of pre-loaded apps on the Reliance 3G Tab. Apart from YouTube, Google Map, Google Search, Gmail and social networking sites, you also have the option of logging in to R World Online, Reliance's app that gives you tidbits of latest news, music, movies, wallpapers, social networking apps and the like.
Clicker
The camera on the 3G Tab is a basic 2-megger. So it wasn't really a surprise that it gave really average results. Most clicks were grainy if zoomed into even just a little bit and there was a bit of trouble with the focus wherein most pictures resulted being slightly blurry. The unit also has a front-facing camera to make video calls.
Multimedia
The Reliance 3G Tab comes with 4GB of memory. Most of us need much more and the tab gives you the option of expanding the memory up to 32GB with an external storage. I streamed some videos from YouTube to test the multimedia performance on the 3G Tab. The stereo speakers are lodged both at the top and the bottom of the tablet . The volume levels as well as clarity on the Tab were fairly good. It's possible to entertain a couple of friends playing a movie on the Tab despite the pretty average screen. The native video player doesn't support .avi files so I turned to my trustworthy RockPlayer Lite for my video playbacks. The Tab also has an in-built FM Tuner.
I couldn't test the 3G browsing capabilities on the Tab, so I tried regular web navigation with the native browser over a Wi-Fi connection. The browser isn't really lightning fast, but it gets your work done. There's no pinch-to-zoom option in this application either, although you have the flexibility of browsing on multiple windows.
Performance
The device is powered by an 800 MHz processor. The 3G Tab did not show visible signs of slowing down while playing games. However, the overall feel while operating the Tab is one of a slightly laggard device, especially if you forget to kill the couple of apps open and running in the background every once in a while. The Reliance 3G Tab is claimed to give about 9 hours of battery life and it did give us company for almost that long on a full charge.
Our verdict
The Reliance 3G Tab doesn't really match up to the best tablets that you can have your pick from if your budget allows it. But for someone who's on the move and needs a tablet to stay connected and read some stuff on without having to shell out big money, the 3G Tab could be an option. The cheaper price tag comes with obvious compromises in form of a slower processor and less megapixels. But, at least it does the job.
Love: Affordable, decent touchscreen and battery life
Hate: Sub-standard camera, slight lags
Rs 12,999
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