Gemini Devices JoyTAB! 9.7″ Tablet PC review

Not long ago, the minimum you’d pay for a decent 10in tablet was £350. Well, times are changing, and the Gemini JoyTAB! 9.7” is the cheapest 10in tablet we’ve ever seen.

As bargain basement Android tablets go, it makes a pretty good first impression. Lift the lid on the brightly coloured box, and you’ll find a well-made and reasonably attractive device. It’s clad in glossy white plastic on the rear, trimmed around the edges in matte silver, and it isn’t bulky and heavy like other cheap tablets we’ve come across. It tips the scales at 672g – around the same as an iPad 3 – and is a slim 10mm thick.

Its specification looks comprehensive, too. There’s a microSD slot for expanding the 16GB of internal storage by 64GB, there are both front and rear 2-megapixel cameras, an LED flash and Bluetooth to go with the 802.11n Wi-Fi. The only thing missing, strangely, is GPS.

Switch it on and the display surprises as much as the rest of the hardware. The resolution is 1,024 x 768, so nothing special, yet it uses the same IPS technology as the iPad, giving bright, colourful images and exceptional viewing angles. In our tests, measuring the brightness of a pure white screen at top brightness with a colorimeter, the JoyTAB!’s display attained a top brightness figure of 299cd/m2, which isn’t bad at all.

The JoyTAB!’s chipset also confounds expectations. It has an ARM-based 1.5GHz dual-core Rockchip CPU, 1GB of RAM and a quad-core Mali 400 graphics processor for gaming. The result is a surprisingly quick-feeling tablet. In the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark it scored 1,302, which is an impressive result.

We loaded a handful of demanding games onto the tablet, including the demanding Shadowgun and Asphalt 7, and found each one played smoothly, hardly dropping a frame. The JoyTAB! coped effortlessly with Full HD video playback, delivering local files and streaming online movies smoothly, and a Mini HDMI output means the tablet can output video to an HD TV, too.

The battery is big enough, meanwhile, that you should be able to get a few viewings in before you have to find a mains socket. In our continuous video test with flight mode enabled, this tablet lasted 9 hours and 48 minutes, which is very impressive for a tablet so cheap.

The Joytab 9.7” runs Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich, and generally, its UI responded in a smooth and fluid fashion to taps, swipes, pinches and flicks. Browsing the web is mostly pleasant as well – there’s a little lag in the reaction of web pages to pan, scroll and zoom gestures, but this doesn’t get in the way of general usability.

There are problems, though, and the biggest is typing lag. As so often afflicts budget tablets in this price bracket, the keys of the onscreen keyboard respond a fraction of a second after your finger hits the screen; this isn’t a problem if you keep the typing speed down, but as you get more confident it becomes irritating, with keys tapped in quick succession often failing to register. Another oddity concerns the tablet’s accelerometer, which we found worked on Temple Run, but not Asphalt 7. This could be an isolated incident, but it’s nonetheless a worrying one.

Our review unit also arrived with no out-of-the-box access to Google Play, nor any of the standard Google Apps – Maps, Mail, Gmail and so on. Fortunately, we were able to add Google Play by manually downloading the install file, and Gemini assured us that tablets sent to customers will have the software pre-installed.

Those issues aside, the JoyTAB! is a decent buy. Although the big name tablet manufacturers have introduced low-cost 7in tablets, none have yet produced a standard Android 10in tablet at this sort of price, and even among bargain units the Joytab 9.7in stands out. Its smooth, fast performance, good battery life and excellent screen make it a great Budget Buy.