Asus MeMo Pad 8 review

Asus has a great track record when it comes to making tablets. The company was, after all, entrusted with two of Google’s Nexus 7 tablets. We were therefore not surprised it had another hit on its hands with the Asus MeMO Pad 7, which provided excellent performance for a low price.

The Asus MeMO Pad 8 is the slightly larger model. At 8.3mm thick and weighing 320g, it is both svelte and lightweight. Surprisingly, the MeMO Pad 8 is thinner than its 7in counterpart and only 25g heavier. In contrast, the Tesco Hudl2 is 9mm thick and 410g, and the difference can be felt when you hold the tablets side by side. The Hudl2 does have a fractionally larger screen, however.

The MeMO Pad 8 feels well constructed with little flex in the chassis. The back is made of a soft, textured plastic that is easy to grip. The tablet is available with a black or white behind, but also in eye-catching shades of gold and purple. We reviewed the latter and liked how it made a change from the norm.

The tablet is an unfussy design with no gimmicks such as rear-mounted buttons; power and volume controls are on the side and easy to reach. On one of the long sides is a microSD card slot, but this is exposed rather than hidden away behind a protective flap. The slot lets you expand the tablet’s built-in 16GB of storage with a microSD card up to 64GB in capacity.

Although we came away slightly disappointed by the screen in the Asus MeMO Pad 7, Asus has used a far superior panel in the MeMO Pad 8. It may only have a 1,280×800 resolution, compared to the 1,920×1,200 of the cheaper Tesco Hudl2, but its performance in our tests was a big improvement.

While the MeMO Pad 7 only managed a contrast ratio of 685:1, the MeMO Pad 8 scored an excellent 1,138:1, putting it ahead of the Tesco Hudl2. Its coverage of the sRGB colour gamut was also very good for a cheap tablet, with a measured coverage of 75%, although this is behind the Hudl2. Black levels are an excellent 0.18cd/m2.

We did notice a very subtle emphasis towards green colour tones, but you’ll really need to be picking holes to notice. The Asus Splendid app allows you adjust the display, so setting it to a warmer temperature was a big improvement. Viewing angles were also very good, meaning you can view the screen off-centre without too much colour shift. There’s a useful reading mode to help reduce the contrast of the display for more comfortable reading.

The MeMO Pad 8 is equipped with a quad-core 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z3745 processor and 1GB of RAM. Initially it was a little disappointing to see less RAM than on the Tesco Hudl2, with its more generous 2GB. We didn’t really feel the difference in general use, with the MeMO Pad 8 feeling responsive in all tasks. In fact, the MeMO Pad 8 displayed superior browser performance in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, recording a score of 598.8ms, a good 200ms faster than the Tesco tablet. We did, however, observe some stuttering on more complex websites when quickly scrolling around.

Gaming performance was also very good for a low-cost tablet. In our Ice Storm Extreme test, the MeMO Pad 8 managed 8,212 and in Ice Storm Unlimited it scored 12,042, which is above average. Its Ice Storm Unlimited score was still around 2,000 points behind the Tesco Hudl2, however.  The tablet’s Intel processor has good 3D performance, but there are currently some problems with compatibility. For example, we’ve encountered problems with Assassin’s Creed Pirates on other Intel-based tablets and here again we witnessed crashes on launch.

Asus has tweaked Android 4.4 KitKat with its own ZenUI skin. This includes changes to the lockscreen to bring you useful weather and calendar updates as well as shortcuts to useful apps such as the browser and email. ZenUI uses copious amounts of pastel shades for the UI that are easy on the eye. There are also shortcuts in the Quick Settings pulldown menu for useful apps such as the calculator and Asus’ own Quick Memo app.

The Camera app has also been replaced with Asus’ own and comes packed with features such as Time Rewind and animated GIF creation.  The tablet is equipped with a 2-megapixel front camera and a 5-megapixel camera on the back. Image quality was middling in our outdoor test shots with a lot of chroma noise in the shadow detail and an overall softness to the image. Low-light photography fared even worse. While the MeMO Pad 8 punched well above its weight elsewhere, the camera is distinctly what you would expect for a low-cost tablet.

The MeMo Pad 8 is a great tablet for little money. Its screen has good image quality, performance is strong and 9h 56m of battery is considerably more than that of its great rival the Tesco Hudl2. However, the Hudl2 is cheaper and has a Full HD screen for pin-sharp text, so remains our favourite budget tablet.