Saturday 18 August 2012

And Bible on a 7" Chinese Ainol Tablet

Having used And Bible extensively on a G1 and a Nexus One mobile for 2 years I recently purchased a cheap 7" Chinese Ainol tablet.  Here follows a summary of my experience using And Bible on the Ainol Aurora.

Usage Pattern
The size of the tablet led to a different usage pattern to a mobile phone.  Being the size of a paperback it is easier to read the screen and so, instead of predominantly favouring Speak, I find myself reading more.  However, the larger size of the tablet also means the speaker is quite usable, meaning it is more acceptable to Speak text for my wife and I to listen to.

The tablet is just about pocketable if you have large pockets, but I cannot see myself walking around listening to books as I do with my mobile.

Strengths
The main strength is the screen size.

Price is another strong point.  What other nice ICS device can be bought for under £100!

Technical Limitations
There is no gravitational sensor in this tablet and so Tilt-to-scroll is automatically disabled.  There is an accelerometer so it should be possible to enable this feature, but with such a large screen tilt-to-scroll is not really necessary.

Performance
The 1Ghz chip is fast but not state of the art.  The tablet does slow down noticeably when a background task is running e.g. downloading, but if you keep removing unused tasks from memory using the excellent new ICS Task Switcher (swipe the app to the side) then performance seems better.

Update August 2012: And Bible runs great on a tablet but I would probably but a Nexus 7 rather than a cheap Chinese tablet.