Journal Entry/Device Impressions:
Giving a certain phablet a shakedown run
It's not the highest end, but it does a lot of things right given my short experience with it
The bootup times on it are relatively quick, and overall performance was good for day to day use, despite running on the older Cortex A9 architecture with 4 cores only. I'll be ignoring benchmarks, they're pointless to the average user and for the most part are only used to satisfy number loving, spec biased ****ers in this case.
It's camera, running on the older Exmor R 13MP sensor from Sony, gives even Sony phones using the same sensor a good run for their money (or more like, destroy them), and it performs decently in the dark for a mobile camera too. Problem is though, is the lack of control, and 3rd party programs (Camera FV 5 in this case) has not access to the extra controls to the phablet as well. The biggest issue with the camera is noise in darker areas of the pictures, but given how tiny the sensors are, it's not surprising. It's forward facing 5MP camera is also surprisingly good, better than I expected it to be anyway :Oc
The colours on the (slightly warm by default) 7" 1920x1200 laminated (no air gap) screen (322dpi) are very good, if slightly oversaturated. One thing I don't get is the desire for folks wanting a thin bezel (thicker bezels are easier for control on a device of this size IMO), and I've had several issues with my hand wrapping around it too much so my thumbs and other fingers get in the way of my other hand's fingers trying to control it. On the ASUS Memopad HD 7, my thumb rests on the bezel and 4 fingers go round the back to hold the tablet in place, but this 7" screened device has me claw the whole thing from behind... Which feels a bit weird IMHO.
It's Wifi range is good to say the least (at least as good as the Memopad HD7, if not better, given the distance outside of my home), and it latches onto any nearby wifi previously logged into with alarming immediacy (compared to the previous devices I used, including the Moto XT910, Sony Xperia Z, Sony Tablet S, ASUS Memopad HD7, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5), and it's got SIM card compatibility as well, though limited to 3G (though I don't really care for that bit.
Speaking of card compatibility, it's compatible with a 64GB SDXC card as well, so I expect future compatibility with higher capacity cards once they become more mainstream too. Issue here is, the cards must be formatted to the FAT32 format, so files are limited to 4GB sizes per. Not an issue unless you wanna store a huge 1080p movie file tho. According to my tests, it's internal memory is pretty good as well, just not SSD class good (but then again, no mobile devices memory quality are on that level so...)
That said, it's sound has a bit of issues, not sure if it's just the unit on my end though, but I'd imagine that it shouldn't be - Depending on how the sound file is encoded, it tends to crack when it gets too loud. The speaker though, isn't bad. It's loud, but not on the same level of loudness as the HD7 is, which in turn is dwarfed by the loudness of the Motorola XT910 (few phones and/or tablets reach the same volume levels as the Motorola RAZR XT910, that thing is just freaking loud). The good thing though, is that the speakers don't sound tinny... But that said, they don't sound that rich either - They just get the job done.
Special mentions goes to it's weight and design. One thing I really like about the Nexus and iPhone/iPad design is the lack of branding on their front surface, and this thing has a very large screen to front surface ratio (4:5). While the back of the device is also dominated by plastic on a total of 20% of it's antennae area, the rest is covered by metal, giving for a good premium feel (gets slippery over time tho). It's also only about 239grams, which is ~150% of the weight of the 144g Xperia S and the 146g Xperia Z. The weight is very evenly balanced too, good for controlling the tablet, but it seems to prefer being handled in landscape mode than portrait mode, maybe due to the lack of a proper bezel (too thin, kinda irritating IMO, the Nexus 7 2013 version nailed the right bezel size as far as I'm concerned).
The sides of the device are made of metal too, presumably aluminium to save weight, and the top and bottom of the device are made out of some sort of a soft touch plastic material.
One thing to note is it's battery - it's 5000mAh. It doesn't sound like much, and maybe it isn't, I'm not sure, but given how much screen real estate that is VS the Xperia Z's 5 inches (and 2300mAh battery) for example, it lasts over twice as long in my own experiments. Cellular Data connectivity was on, and playing a 720p Top Gear file MP4 file that lasted 1h1min long at maximum brightness drained about 11% of it's battery, so it can easily last about 9 hours on a full charge watching 720p MP4 movie files on full charge with cellular activity on. Hammering it with the usual activities that I do (web surfing, twitter, eBook reading) yields better results even when compared to the WiFi only ASUS Memopad HD7 too
Anyways, that's enough rambling for now
Below is a shot of the phablet itself and a few photoes I took, unaltered, on it's shakedown run.
For the price of the device (Free on Data enabled 2 year contract in the future), I'm really impressed with what this thing can do so far. The going market rate for the Huawei Mediapad X1 is about SG$430 for now (RM1105.30, US$345.00, 255 Euroes). It basically is a device capable of putting together one's smartphone and tablet together for daily use, eliminating the need for a 2nd device if one is a phone/tablet user (unless one desires a larger screen real estate)
Will it be a durable enough device when being put through everyday use though? Only time will tell. Maybe I'll do an impression update come the near future.
