Advent Vega review

Just looking at the price, an Android Tablet for just £250 has got to be pretty rubbish hasn’t it? After all, the Samsung Galaxy Tab is almost double that price. Fortunately, this is a misconception and the Advent Vega proves that a decent tablet doesn’t have to cost the earth.

It’s made of plastic, so doesn’t have the build quality of the Apple iPad, but Advent’s done a really nice job and the Vega feels tough and doesn’t exhibit the creakiness we experienced from the Toshiba Folio 100. It also keeps the weight down, with the Vega weighing a spritely 700g. This makes it comfortable to hold for long periods, although the 10.1in screen means that it’s better suited to resting on your lap than holding in the hand – unlike 7in tablets.

We were looking for places where Advent has cut corners to keep the cost down, but aside from the plastic casing there’s very little evidence of this. The 10.1in capacitive touchscreen has a resolution of 1,024×600 (the same as a netbook). It’s a pretty decent screen, too. Horizontal and vertical viewing angles are good, although at extreme angles colour accuracy starts to diminish. Still, for personal use it’s more than adequate, with a bright image and vivid colours.

We felt sure that Advent must have cut costs by installing a slow processor, but the 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 250 proves this isn’t the case. As well as providing plenty of processing power for the Android 2.2 operating system, the Tegra 250 can play Full HD video without juddering. The Vega felt very responsive in every task, such as pinching to zoom on a web page. Sound is pretty reasonable, producing loud and clear audio, although bass is a little lacking. For personal listening there’s also a headphone port, or you can output everything to an HD TV via HDMI.

Thanks to Android 2.2 there’s support for Flash, which is pre-installed. It’s good to see that Advent sets the browser to use plug-ins on demand, so you have to tap a Flash element to activate it, rather than having it start automatically and drain battery power.

This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, though, as the battery life of this tablet is actually very good. It should last around eight hours (roughly a couple of days of normal use) for standard tasks, such as web browsing and email, while video will reduce the battery life to around five hours.

It’s not perfect, though, and there are some niggles. For starters, the default installation doesn’t come with any of the standard Android Apps, such as Gmail and Google Maps, and there’s no market either. This would be a massive black mark against this tablet, but fortunately, the Android Modding website MoDaCo provides a free mod that you can download. Once you’ve installed it following our simple instructions you get the all of the standard Android applications and access to the Market. It may seem like a bit of a workaround, but until the official Advent update comes next year, it’s an essential add-on. Without it we simply wouldn’t recommend buying the Vega.

A 4GB Micro SD card provides storage space for files, photos and apps which support this kind of installation, otherwise there’s 512MB of memory available internally.

It’s also a little frustrating that of the standard Android buttons (Home, Back, Menu and Search), there’s only a physical Back button on the top of the device. Instead, Advent has widened the status bar at the top of the screen to include the Home, Status and Back buttons. These work pretty well but have three disadvantages. First, they’re not displayed on every screen and some apps, such as the Android Gallery, take up the entire screen; secondly, they take up screen resolution on other apps, making the web browser feel a little more cramped; finally, we couldn’t activate the usual Android task-switcher using the soft-buttons and had to install Task Switcher from the Market instead. We also found that the screen is occasionally too sensitive and typing on the onscreen keyboard would sometimes repeat a character.

Another oddity is how the pull-down menu appears the same width as it would on a smartphone, failing to fit the screen. In fairness, all of these are minor little niggles that don’t particularly spoil the enjoyment of the Vega.

We like the screen rotation lock switch on top of the tablet, so you can choose which way you want to use the tablet (portrait or landscape) and keep it that way. This makes it much easier to use without the screen rotating whenever you move the Vega.

Little has been done to Android, bar adjusting the homescreen to work in landscape-only mode. It’s a shame that the web browser hasn’t been tweaked and that copy-and-paste hasn’t been improved, as on the Galaxy Tab, but it’s not a huge problem.

There’s no 3G, with only 802.11b/g wireless providing a connection to the internet. It’s fair to say that you can’t really expect 3G on a device at this price, though. There’s also no GPS receiver either, although without 3G the Google Maps Navigation app is essentially a little pointless, so you won’t miss having it.

Bizarrely, the Advent Vega connects to a PC via its USB Type A socket (the type on a PC), rather than Micro or Mini USB. It also can’t charge over USB, so you need to plug in the standard power adaptor instead. The dock connector is not currently used, but a dock should be out next year some time.

The minor niggles weren’t enough to spoil our enjoyment of this tablet. It’s not as polished as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but it’s responsive and excellent value. If you’re looking for an Android tablet on a budget, this is the one to buy, just make sure you install the mod to get the Market working.