Mercury Budget Tablet MTab 7

Mercury Budget Tablet MTab 7

 

The budget tablet market has been getting a new member almost every month now. The newest addition comes in the form of the Mercury mTAB, a 7-inch tablet priced just under the Rs.10,000 mark. Back in the nineties, Mercury were pretty popular for their computer peripherals, mostly speakers. Today, the company has expanded into the tablet market as well and why not, with all the the hype surrounding these new gadgets, it’s only natural for a company to want to cash-in on some of the limelight. So, let’s find out if the mTAB is really worth your while.Taking it out of the box, the mTAB is pretty lightweight at 400g and is very comfortable to hold, too. It’s not particularly slim, though, which may be a turn off for some. The mTAB is built entirely of plastic, with a black bezel and white back. The front has a glossy finish, which easily attracts fingerprints. There are two physical buttons on the front, for ‘Options’ and ‘Back’. The front-facing camera is placed in the bottom corner, which we felt was a rather odd place. Overall the mTAB is decently built with no creaking parts. It may not score many points in the looks department, but what more can one expect from budget tablets

It has a decent set of connectors including mini-HDMI, microSD card slot, mini-USB with On-the-go functionality and a 3.5mm headphone jack. There are physical buttons for volume, home and power. For some reason, the mTAB simply refused to reset to the default settings. We even tried a hard reset using the button on the back, but to no avail.

Features Interface : The mTAB is powered by a 1.2GHz single core processor and runs Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread. The 7-inch screen is capacitive, so using it is not too painful. It responds well to touch and two finger multi-touch is present as well. Unfortunately, the resolution is pretty low and also the colour gamut is not very wide, which causes major banding in photos and videos. The screen, while bright is not able to display rich colours, so the end result is a washed out image. Also, since there’s no ambient light sensor, you’ll have to manually adjust the brightness.UI except for some shortcut switches in the notification bar, whose same functions can be done through the physical buttons making them pointless. Linpack gave a score of 15.4 for single threaded and 14.6 for multi-threaded, while AnTuTu spat out a score of 1983, which is very near to the Google Nexus One. 

Media:The stock music player supports only MP3 and a couple of other formats like WAV, depite Mercury’s ambitious claim on their site, which even mention FLAC. Of course, you can expand this by installing a third party music player. The same goes for videos, too. 1080p MP4 videos play smoothly out-of-the-box without any stutter or lag. Moboplayer helps extend the format support even further. There’s built-in 4GB of memory, but only 219 MB is actually available to the user. The tablet does, however support 32GB microSD cards (even though the site states 16GB).The stock music player is basic at bestThe audio quality of the built-in speaker is decently loud and clear. But even with good in-ear earphones like EP630, the audio from the stock player is average at best. 

Connectivity:There is no 3G connectivity, but you do get Wi-Fi, however it’s only limited to b/g and not n. Due to this, the tablet sometimes struggles to get a strong signal, even if you’re in the vicinity of the router. HDMI-out lets you share content straight onto an HDTV, but you’ll have to buy the cable separately. Furthermore, you can configure the output in the settings, as well. We could not test the USB On-the-go functionality, since the cable was missing, but we guess only pen drives are supported.  

Battery Life:The mTAB is fitted with a 4000mAh battery, which managed about 4hr 30min, which is strictly average. Compared to the other 7-inch tablets we reviewed, it’s pretty much on par, but we expected better numbers. In the loop tests, it came up just shy of 4hrs.