Linx 7 review

The Linx 7 is the cheapest Windows 8.1 tablet we’ve ever tested. At only £80 it immediately grabbed our interest, and this was piqued even further when we found out it comes with a year’s subscription to Office 365 Personal. This alone is worth around £50, and will let you use the Office suite on one PC or Mac, one tablet and one smartphone, so you’re not even limited to just using Office on the Linx 7 itself. You can even get a £30 rebate if you trade in an old tablet, although the appeal in doing this will very much depend on what tablet you might have lying around

We weren’t expecting a huge amount considering the low price, but found ourselves pleasantly surprised by the Linx 7’s build quality and design. The thin bezel around the screen helps the already-compact tablet feel even smaller. At 9.5mm thick it’s not the thinnest tablet you’ll ever see, but isn’t too chunky for a budget model. It’s also not too heavy at 280g, so is comfortable to hold one-handed and we were happily able to do so for extended periods.

The chassis is made from an unexciting matt black plastic that at least feels robust. There wasn’t any noticeable flex anywhere to the chassis, which is always reassuring. Along the top of the tablet you’ll find a Micro USB charging port, Micro HDMI for connecting to an external display, a headphone jack and an exposed microSD slot. You can install a microSD card up to 64GB in capacity. Our review model came with 32GB of storage, and a browse of the Linx tablets website states that tablets are 32GB for a limited time only, after which they will only come with 16GB.

Although the Linx 7’s build quality and design were a real surprise, the screen shows where costs have been cut. The Linx 7 has a 1,280×800 display, which is the resolution we’re used to seeing with lower-cost Windows tablets, but as these pixels are packed on to a small 7in panel that leaves a respectable pixel density of 215ppi.

However, the real problem with the display is its grainy quality. There’s also distinct backlight bleed from the top and bottom of the screen. This is most noticeable when the screen is displaying dark images. The screen itself also picks up fingerprints more easily than most tablets, so every touch of the screen resulted in greasy marks, and the screen soon became very grubby. Having to constantly wipe down the screen proved frustrating after a while.

Our calibrator also showed the display had poor colour accuracy, with it only able to produce 62.9% of the sRGB colour gamut. This is below average, but still a fraction higher than the similarly low-priced Samsung Galaxy Tab Lite Android tablet. Black levels were also poor but marginally better than the Samsung tablet, with a score if at 0.49 cd/m2. Contrast ratio is a paltry 625:1.

The Linx 7 uses a quad-core Intel Atom Z3735G processor from the “Bay Trail” family. This chip runs at 1.33GHz with the ability to burst up to 1.83GHz. This is paired with only 1GB of RAM; right at the bottom of Windows 8.1’s system requirements. Performance in our Windows benchmarks was respectable, however, especially considering the tablet’s price. An overall score of 19 is higher than we see from some with super-cheap laptops, and equal to the more expensive Toshiba Encore 2 WT-10A.

Although you shouldn’t expect to use the Linx 7 for processor-intensive applications, it works fine for browsing the web and editing documents. A score of 489.3ms in our SunSpider JavaScript browser benchmark is about what we expect from Windows 8.1-based tablets, and better than most Android tablets.

Gaming performance was also good for the price. Scores of 6,198 and 7,621 in the 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme and Ice Storm Unlimited tests are surprisingly good. The only problem is the limited selection of games available on the Windows Store, as you won’t be able to play most games designed for laptops or desktops on a touchscreen.

The Linx 7 is equipped with 2-megapixel cameras on the front and back. The rear camera produced some of the worst-quality images we’ve encountered, with large amounts of chroma noise in the shadow tones. The images also lacked detail, with some darker elements just appearing as solid colour, which was a real problem as the Linx 7 underexposed many of our test shots. There was also a distinct lack of sharpness. Don’t expect to be using the Linx 7 for any photography unless you have very low expectations. The front-facing similarly produced a lot of noise but will at least do a serviceable job for video chat.

The Linx 7 is an incredibly cheap Windows 8.1 tablet and its build quality was a genuinely pleasant surprise. Although it certainly has its shortcomings, such as its below-average display, its performance is definitely respectable. If you only have a limited budget and are looking for a Windows 8.1 tablet, the Linx 7 is great value, especially when you factor in the year’s subscription to Office 365 Personal that you can also use on a PC or Mac. It’s hardly an object of desire, but is certainly a sensible budget purchase.