Gigaset QV830 review

At just £70, the Gigaset QV830 is one of the cheapest Android tablets available. However, although the quality and performance of tablets at the £120-150 price point has come on leaps and bounds, this seemingly hasn’t quite trickled down as much to Android tablets under £100.

The QV830 is surprisingly well built for its price, however. While we usually expect to see copious amounts of cheap plastic for a budget tablet, such as on Amazon’s built-to-a-price Kindle Fire HD 6, the QV830 is made of much classier material. There’s no flex anywhere on the chassis, which is reassuring. However, our main issue with its design was with its sharp corners. While most tablets have rounded off corners, the Gigaset QV380 has abrupt right angles that dig into your hands.

The tablet is otherwise surprisingly thin and light, weighing 328g and measuring 8mm thick. Most of the tablet is matt black, save for the plastic top and bottom edges with their chrome trim. All the tablet’s controls and connections are located on the top, making it look slightly cluttered. You’ll find a power button, volume rocker, headphone jack, Micro USB port and microSD card slot around the tablet’s edge. The buttons are slightly too small for our tastes and are too recessed into the tablet body, making it difficult to find them, and the lack of travel, especially with the power button, makes it tricky to press.

The microSD card slot will allow you to expand the tablet’s built-in 8GB of storage by installing a microSD card up to 32GB in capacity. The slot is hidden away behind a flap, which should help to keep dust out. With only around 5GB of usable storage left, you might need a microSD card sooner rather than later, which takes away slightly from the tablet’s extremely low price. On the back is a single mono speaker that produces harsh, tinny sound. It lacks any real detail and there’s next to no bass response. It’s reasonably loud at its highest volume, but you’re going to be better off plugging in a pair of headphones for a more enjoyable experience.

The Gigaset QV830 has a 4:3 aspect ratio 8in screen similar in dimensions to the iPad Air 2’s display. With a 1,024×768 resolution, this makes for a pixels per inch measurement of just 160ppi, meaning pixels are easily perceptible even from a regular viewing distance. The screen also has a grainy quality, which is most noticeable when looking at solid colours, and some banding. Our display calibrator showed the screen was able to produce 67.2% of the sRGB colour gamut, which is low but hard to criticise considering the tablet’s price. We’ve seen more expensive tablets produce similar colour accuracy

The display’s black levels were surprising, however. At 0.29cd/m2 the Gigaset QV380’s black levels were fractionally deeper than more expensive tablets such as the Tesco Hudl2, which is impressive. Its contrast ratio was also excellent all things considered at 1,031:1, as good as the Tesco Hudl2 and almost equalling the Asus MeMO Pad 8, both pricier tablets. Colours produced were suitably vibrant and, while not the most accurate, the display would have been respectable were it not for the low resolution and grainy texture.

Inside the Gigaset QV830 is a quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex A7 system-on-chip (SoC) paired with 1GB of RAM. This is very much a low-end SoC and this was reflected in its performance benchmarks. The QV830 managed a very poor time of 1,651ms in our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, showing it is slow to render web pages. When scrolling through image-heavy websites there was a noticeable delay between swiping and scrolling, which was a little disorienting. We also encountered some sluggishness when navigating around the operating system, with the occasional delay when opening apps or the app drawer.

Anyone looking for a cheap Android gaming tablet will be disappointed. The Gigaset GV830 managed some of the lowest scores we’ve seen in our Ice Storm graphics benchmarks. In Ice Storm Extreme it managed just 1,532, and in Unlimited an equally poor 2,560. The Gigaset GV830 will struggle with anything beyond the most casual games, such as Plants vs. Zombies and Candy Crush Saga.

The Gigaset GV830 runs Android 4.2.2 and is essentially a stock Android experience out of the box. Beyond pre-installing online help and system upgrade apps, Gigaset hasn’t changed the operating system much. There’s a custom Camera app with the usual options such as Panorama, HDR images, self-timer and touch-to-focus.

The QV830 has a 1.2-megapixel camera on the front and a 5-megapixel camera on the rear. The rear camera produces middling-quality photos. It produced underexposed images even in our outdoor test shots, with plenty of noise in shadowy areas. The images were also soft and had muted colours.  We weren’t expecting much from the camera and it performed about as well as expected.

It feels harsh to be too critical of the Gigaset QV830, as it’s one of the cheapest tablets we’ve seen. If your budget really is limited to this amount, it’s not a terrible choice for a general web-browsing tablet. Its battery life of 7 hours and 31 minutes is respectable and enough to get you through a few films while on the move. Despite this, we still feel you’d be happier saving up some more for the vastly superior Tesco Hudl2.