Astro Tab A735 – 7” Quad Core Android 5.1 Lollipop Tablet PC with 1GB RAM, 8GB Storage, Bluetooth 4.0, 1024x600 7 inch Screen, Google Play (Black)

Before I get into the shortcomings of this tablet, I'll summarize with this: incredible value for your money.The screen isn't crisp or sharp, but it's good enough to watch a movie on. Text tends to be a bit fuzzy though.The worst thing about the tablet is having to mash the screen repeatedly to get a link to activate or an application to launch. However this seems to be a common issue across most Android devices.The volume and power controls default to the bottom of the tablet in vertical mode. This is annoying.Lastly, the Wi-Fi is blazingly... SLOW. It's like going back to dial-up at times. Good gravy it crawls.However, I still believe this is a great value for a tablet. You could buy three of them for the price of a marginally better brand.I would bit this tablet again.

IntroI purchased the Astro Tab A735* about six months ago when trying to chose a cheap tablet. I was initially quite pleased with the tablet. There were some inherent weaknesses, but for $49 it was all within the bounds of reason. After a quick one-two of damaging incidents, the original problems intensified and continued use became untenable. I sought assistance from Inspira and had a highly positive customer service experience. I have strong, good feelings about the company, and I think they are a creative standout in this crowded product space. Ultimately, though, my replacement tablet is not an Astro Tab.*Note, the A735 and A737 models are identical but for the IPS display in the later. It might be the case that Amazon now carries the A737 as the base model. I can't speak to the differences in the displays, but that was never really a consideration, at all, for me.My Philosophy of ConsumptionI tend to buy cheap electronics. I'd like to say inexpensive, but, no, I mean cheap. I don't care about the new and best. I'd rather be several years behind and pick up the commodity-grade version. At that point, I'm trying to find a relative maximum in marginal utility, ie, the best of the base tier. Not a diamond, but the shiniest pebble. At that level, I expect reliability, I expect some quirks, but I expect for those quirks to never become a distraction. That's my sweet spot, and that's definitely how I would classify the Astro Tab at its best.My Philosophy of Hand-held ComputingThere is nothing I do with a hand-held device that I can't do more efficiently on my desktop computer. There may be special use cases that don't apply to me. Also, hell, the Ipad Pro or something in that class might give my desktop a run for certain aspects of performance. But generally we all still rely on desktops or laptops for heavy lifting. Lots of screen real estate and physical keyboards and mice are awesome. Maybe I'm a dinosaur, but I don't see how that changes.Hence, the essential elements of a tablet's portability had better be on point, because that's the only reason for me to have it. I see these as being battery, wireless connectivity (mostly), durability (kind of), and display (kind of, not really).My Idiosyncratic Use CaseI am PC-savvy and legally blind. My eyes strain at small displays. The text magnification required to make things truly comfortable ends up making them more cumbersome. The smaller the screen, the more annoying it is. It's not worth it for me to own a smartphone. Nonetheless, am I not surrounded by smartphones and desiring of a taste of Android?I have been seeking a 7-inch tablet, a shiny pebble with no data plan, to use as an audio player, to occasionally but not even regularly check email, and to play dumb games. Something to automatically sync my podcasts when I came home. And Bluetooth. That's it.My Experience of the Astro Tab A735We all know “it's the little things,” so don't act surprised by the more insane minutia of these observations. We all have our little preferences. Right out of the box there were things I liked. It's plastic and lightweight, but it felt sturdy and had no flex whatsoever.I'm madly in love with the button implementation. Nothing at all on the face and nothing on 3 of the 4 sides. One side, the “right” in landscape, I guess, has power, volume, headphone, micro usb, and a micro sd slot. All on one narrow side. I LOVE that. All in one place, out of the way, in the least likely place to be touched accidentally. I have a possibly unreasonable aversion to accidental button presses—poor design, that's all it is. The firmness and click of the buttons is immensely satisfying. No grazing half-presses; you need to push down on it. Quality. The volume is two distinct buttons, not a rocker. Again, perfect. No unnecessary wear. This should be the standard.Use in portrait keeps everything at the top, out of the way. Optimal headphone location. It has the right aspect ratio; I've seen other cheap tablets that are slightly more square-shaped for some reason, and it feels all wrong.It takes a minute to boot from off. Well, definitely 45 seconds anyway. Intolerable for some people, but I don't care, because you never have to turn it off. Once on, it's zippy enough. Apps are slightly, slightly slow to load, but never any hangs or stutters in the UI. You really feel and appreciate the quad core when multitasking. For $49 I say the cpu is a BEAST. One gig of ram is generous too.The display is fine and nothing more. Clear. Not very bright. You can almost forget about using it outside on a very sunny day. Crank the brightness and you can watch the battery tick down until your hard boiled eggs are ready.I swear when I bought it the battery was blurbed at 5 hours. Now it says 4hrs. Either I'm wrong, or they downgraded because, man, 5hrs doesn't mean 5:02; it means 4:51 with any kind of mixed use. And that's just how it is. Battery is fundamental for me, but I learned to make it work.The biggest problem since day one, and the thing that ultimately tanked the Astro Tab for me is the wireless connectivity. I'm into computer science, not electrical engineering, and I struggled so long to put this into words: the Astro Tab feels like it has a WEAK antenna. This seems to be a common complaint with really cheap tablets. Bluetooth is rated for 10 meters, and I could only ever get half that indoors. Outside, bombarded by RF, I could barely get a signal from my wireless headphones to my back pocket. It was kind of nuts. I wasn't happy, but again I made it work.I expect to pick up wifi from every corner of my house, and I couldn't. And as time went on, the Bluetooth and the wifi started to increasingly degrade one another. Wifi would drop out for no reason. Downloads were slower than every other device I own from the same distance to the router. Too slow for files. Good enough for web/email I guess.So, let me say this. If you're the right kind of person and know how to use a soldering iron, this MIGHT be a really quick fix. I don't know, but I've seen similar cases. People do mods and achieve great things with reception. That might work here, but it's several steps further than I want to go for a “just works” experience. Not using Bluetooth is an option. So, hey, I could use wired headphones, right? Wrong. Dealbreaker.When I finally cracked and ruined the screen and display, I knew damn well it wasn't worth repairing because full replacement costs less. However, I chose to anyway. BTW, replacement parts live on ebay. I fixed the display, but the wireless issues had gotten worse, and they weren't great to start with. In the course of sorting that out, though, I reached out to the manufacturer, Inspira. I received a timely email from their tech support and got a we-don't-usually-do-this kind of offer to send it in for a free REPAIR.Now, ultimately, I did not take advantage of that, weighing time over money in that instance, but that is one hell of an offer. Ten thousand points for customer service. Astro Tabs are made in America, which matters to me, you can actually talk to them, and they stand behind their products. That's what I took away from the experience, and that's not bad.They did SO many things right to produce a shockingly good $49 tablet. Shockingly good, but tragically flawed. I love their design concepts, I love the power they put under the hood, and I can't wait to see what else they might come out with.Here is a summary of my observations.The Good -price -processing performance -sd card expansion -design / build quality -responsiveness of touch system is excellent, above average for price range -pretty much stock android, close to no proprietary bloatware and garbage, which is really awesome -lightweight, if that matters to you -looks like something no one wants to steelThe Good Enough -display—you can see it -android version—I don't care that much—it's 5.1, but stock, like I saidThe Mildly Concerning -battery life—for all I know they're using revolutionary battery technology that's the most efficient thing anyone has come up with but they made it super small—plan your day accordinglyThe Bad -battery life—yeah, it's kinda bad... -camera—you'll notice we haven't discussed the camera—it exists, but barely, and you shouldn't even bother—garbageThe Dealbreakers -Wifi/Bluetooth signal strength and integrityConclusionI have been forced to conclude that there is no such thing as a $49 tablet to meet my basic but precise needs. If you want something to keep next to the sofa for email and web and small games—but probably not Youtube in HD—look no further. I give the Astro Tab 6 out of 5 stars.I'm not joking. Even though battery and connectivity are fundamental to portability and should maybe be expected, there is a light-use case where this tablet stuns you with its affordable excellence.As for me, my new goal became to find the brightest gem among the low end of the name brands. And I found it.... See my review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7.0. Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7-Inch Tablet (8 GB, Black)

After about 2 weeks of use this brings in some good and some bad, but overall I felt this was a good product for the price.I paid $45 for this unit and with specs similar to the Kindle Fire without the adds!The good:Decent quad core processor with enough speed to do most tasks$45The bad:The screen is pretty bad compared to most other screens, it makes reading in the dark or viewing videos cumbersome, I bought this to read but with a little bit of light it isn't too bad. Viewing angles are very limited, and some of the issue can be caused by the dual edge lit screen which the screen could have been better if it had lighting on all 4 edges.I use a SD card with my unit for more space and waking the unit up from sleep, I get a SD card unmounted, then a couple seconds I get a display saying it is mounted. So my ebooks are on the card so I have to wait till I get the SD card mounted indication before unlocking so Aldiko doesn't crash because of the unmounted SD card.I'm giving it 5 stars because many of these cheap tablets have issues, and the issues on this one is very minor for the price, and you are getting Android 5.1 without adds and you can put whatever apps you want like any other android tablet with Google Play or any other service you with to use.

This is a straight-forward tablet that just works. Octane 2.0 score is 1939 when running Chrome.The camera is awful. The one I bought has the camera rotated about 10 degrees. It's hilarious. Not sure how they mucked that up. But the camera is ALWAYS terrible in cheap tablets. You may care about the user-facing camera for Skype or something, but I'm really not sure why anyone would care at all about the world-facing one. Your phone has a great camera, and this thing is $50.I bought an Amazon tablet, hoping to get a fast tablet to use for Netflix and Chromecast. What came was utterly unusable. Ads + more ads + crippled OS. This Astro Tab is the opposite. It just works, it contains ZERO crapware, and after 10 minutes clicking on icons in the store, you're up and running with just what you'd expect.NICE.