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Gadgets Tablet PC

Best Android tablets for kids

The advent of the latest technology has had a deep impact on almost every aspect of our daily lives. Tablet PCs are considered the latest innovation in the computer industry and they have been designed keeping in mind the needs of people from all walks of life and of all age groups. These days, doing business, watching movies and listening to music while travelling has all become ridiculously easy and all credit goes to tablet PCs. In addition, parents even prefer using the aid of the latest technology to educate their children, as a tablet PC can potentially act as the gateway for heaps of infotainment for your kids. This has been combined with the power of Open Source Android and availability of tons of amazing free and paid apps from Google Play Store.

For all parents looking to gift an age-appropriate tablet PC to their young one, here are the top android tablets for kids:

Intel StudyBook

Widely acclaimed by reviewers for its brilliant features, affordability and educative value, Intel StudyBook can be the perfect birthday gift for your little one. This 7-incher is compatible with both Windows and Android Honeycomb 3.0 OS and is highly energy efficient as it is equipped with single-core Intel Atom Z650 chipset. The best part is that Intel StudyBook offers all the right features to educate your kindergartener as well as your kid in the sixth grade. The device is also accompanied with Intel Learning Series Software Suite that offers an amazing learning experience for young kids. Hailed by educators around the globe for its brilliant features, the Intel StudyBook is up for grabs for less than $200.

OLPC XO-3

Developed by the non-profit organization, ‘One Laptop per Child’, the XO-3 is an amazing educational device that uses the muscle of the latest technological advancements to make it work in different environments. Priced at a staggering $100, this amazing tablet PC offers amazing specs that will fulfill the needs of your little one. Powered by Linux OS and Marvel ARMADA PXA618 processor, the XO-3 offers half gigabyte RAM and crystal clear display quality on an 8-inch screen. Although, currently OLPC XO-3 is not available at ordinary retail stores as it is being primarily used as part of education programs in third world countries, still it is only a matter of time before you can buy it for your kids.

Lexibook Kids Tablet

Offering the perfect mix of education and entertainment, the Lexibook Kids Tablet will put an end to your problems with respect to helping your kids in easy learning. Lexibook Kids Tablet offers an easy-to-understand interface, loads of built-in games, built-in Wi-Fi support, pre-loaded songs, educational tests and 53 discovery activities. Parents can hand this amazing device into the hands of their young ones without any apprehension as all the e-books, songs and educational material found in this tablet PC has been selected by the makers after a careful review of the learning needs of kids.

Fuhu Nabi 2

Built to help your children learn and grow into healthy and educated adults, Nabi 2 tablet PC by Fuhu allows you to educate your young kids by blending information and fun together. Featuring NVIDIA Tegra 3.0 1.3 GHz processor and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, this 7-incher offers the best learning system for your kids with instructional sound learning, educational games, age-appropriate song collection and brilliant strategy games such as Treasure Box. Parents can even use Nabi’s online N-SITE to analyze your kid’s progress.

Micromax FunBook

If you are in India, Funbook is worth a buy for your kid as it has an impeccable specs to fall for. At approximately USD 120 or INR 6000 this is indeed the best buy for your kid. Micromax FunBook sports a 7 inch Capacitive touch screen with 800X480 resolution. It comes with 1.2GHZ Cortex A8 processor and Dual Mali-400MP graphics processor. The 512MB RAM is not much impressive though (There is a choice of a pro model with few extra bucks with 1Gb RAM). It is powered by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and comes pre-loaded with many educational apps and videos. Moreove Micromax has an appstore from where you can download apps apart from the regular Google play store.

You might come across many other tablets at the price range mentioned here or below this price, but those are not good. We have compiled this list by observing these models of tablets closely and looking at their popularity and performance.

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Android Gadgets Tablet PC

Unboxing and Review of BSNL T-Pad IS703C Tablet

It seems the Tablet market in India is growing pretty rapidly and this growth is being supplemented by introduction of low cost tablets with open Source Android as the platform of choice. HCL, Micromax and Pantel technologies are leading the bandwagon to release the quite affordable low cost tablets in India. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has collaborated with Pantel technologies to release affordable tablet by the brand name T-Pad. Recently we got an opportunity to try our hands on BSNL T-Pad IS703C tablet and we got a mixed review of the tablet for our readers.

T-Pad IS703C was launched on 29-05-2012. With a price tag of INR 6999, we cannot say T-Pad IS703C as a low cost tablet when there are tablets available for INR 3000. But it will come in the mid or lower midrange tablet category. To offer users a low cost gadgets, company has definitely compromised in few features such as display, battery life, camera, body etc.

Body

At the very first look, it grabs an ascent look but when we look at the rear the blacky shiny plastic body may disappoint few users as the material used for the body is below standard. The form factor is also not quite impressive as compared to other high end tablets like Galaxy Tab or iPad. When I hold the T-Pad for 15-20 minutes, I started feeling pain in my hand. So this might play hindrance to be used for a longer period.

Buttons and Ports

The T-Pad IS703C does not have a physical button on the body, so everything needs to be controlled by touchscreen. As I have been a long time Google Nexus owner, I am pretty used to the physical button, so I found it little awkward at the beginning to work with this tablet.

This has got a lot of physical ports like card reader, HDMI for high definition video output, 3.5mm audio jack, DC adaptor port, USB port to connect a 3G USB dongle or a USB storage device. These ports ar all placed comfortable on one side of the tablet.

It has great support for USB thumb drives and it detected our 4GB Transcend pen drive in no time. We could read and write data to our pen drive without any issue.

Touch Screen/Camera/Speaker/Display

T-Pad IS703C comes with 2 point capacitive multitouch. The sensitivity of the touch screen is not so good when we look at the response time. There seems to be little lag when you touch and when the device senses it and specific command is performed. This might be issue with touch screen or may be due to processing.

It has got only a 0.3 Mega Pixel front facing camera to facilitate video chat.

The built-in speaker provides quite loud sound but the sound quality is not clear when it is output through the speaker. Where in the sound is quite good when heard through a good ear/head phone. We listened the same MP3 song through built-in speaker and ear phone and the difference was clearly noticeable.

Internet Connectivity

This tablet offers Internet connectivity through wi-fi and 3G. But as it does not have a SIM card slot, only 3G USB dongles can be used for 3G Internet access. But wait..it supports only a few 3G dongles. So if you are thinking that you can use any 3G USB dongles then you may be disappointed as we did when we tried to use our Micromax MMX352G. So Micromax 3G dongles are not supported. Below are a list of supported 3G dongles for T-Pad:

Huawei E171

Huawei E173

Huawei E169G

Idea GSM HUAWEI E1732

AIRTEL HUAWEI E1731 (E173Bu-1)

Reliance GSM ZTE MF190

TATA Photon+ EC156

Connectivity through Wi-Fi is pretty good and we could watch youtube videos without buffering at a very nominal Internet speed via wi-fi.

Accessories

T-pad IS703C comes with a wall charger, an earphone and a data cable with micro USB at one end and normal USB at the other end.

Specification of T-Pad IS703C

Processor: Cortex A8 1 GHz

Memory(RAM): 1GB DDR3

Internal Storage: 8GB

External Storage(Memory Card): T-Flash upto 32 GB

Camera: 0.3 Mega Pixel VGA

Operating System:  Android 4.03 ICS

Display: 7” Capacitive Multi touch with 800X480 pixel

HDMI: Supported with video output upto 1080P

G-sensor: G-sensor 3 planes

Conclusion

Some good things about T-Pad 703C are, it supports flash. Internet surfing is a good experience in this device and the speed is quite impressive. It has a good battery backup but takes a little time to charge fully (approx  4hrs). Let us tell about few negative things about this device, first of all absense of sim slot is a disadvantage as user will need to buy a supported dongle.It lacks presence of. It does not support have a GPS or AGPS chip so location will be a spoiler.

Though T-Pad 703C has got some impressive specifications like a 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM, it does not seem to work so fast. This can be a good buy for entry level users and students but for veterans this will be a disappointment. This being a BSNL co-branded tablet should come with some free goodies from BSNL like a supported 3G dongle. As Micromax dongles are advertised as BSNL device and that dongle not being supported in T-Pad will make people confused and disappoint. This device can be a good competitor to Akash as well as Micromax Fun book.