back to article Review: Disgo 8400G 7.9in Android tablet

A 7.9in Jelly Bean Android tablet with 3G connectivity for £150? There has to be a catch, right? Absolutely. The catch with the Disgo 8400G is that you’ve probably never heard of the company before... Now, this could mean you’ll be ahead of the game with the next big thing in affordable fondleslabs if you bought one. However, …

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  1. Longrod_von_Hugendong
    Go

    Proving once again you get what you pay for...

    again, its cheap, its cheerful - an iPad its not - but it will do, great for young kids etc. Other than that - dont really want personally.

    1. Danny 14
      Stop

      Re: Proving once again you get what you pay for...

      No, its shit. There are 1gb offerings with better cpus on ebay for100. For the 150 mark you can get a 10 inch model.

    2. R 11

      Re: Proving once again you get what you pay for...

      It's not great for young kids. Apps with that little RAM are going to be slow and frustrating.

      I have a 2012 Sony Xperia phone with 512MB of RAM and dual core 1GHz processor. It feels slow. There is a hesitation before the keyboard appears. You need a task killer to keep things working in a useable way. And that's just for stuff like facebook or web browsing.

      Kids apps are going to have animated graphics, even if they're basic, and they'll be playing sound - maybe video too.

      If the other posts are true and you can get a 1GB machine on eBay for the same or less, I'd save your money and get something better suited.

      1. Mark .

        Re: Proving once again you get what you pay for...

        I agree. But just to say, I'm amused that the original post talked about "an ipad it's not", and both the replies (rightly) point out the 512MB of RAM in this tablet - thing is 8" ipad also only has 512MB RAM... Sounds to me that the problem is that it is too much like the ipad!

    3. Mark .

      Re: Proving once again you get what you pay for...

      Plus there's the point that despite not being as good as say the Nexus 7 (odd that we didn't see much/any comparison to that), it was still as good in many respects as a far more expensive ipad mini, which makes similar compromises in things like resolution and RAM, despite the price. The only downsides seem to be the display not be as bright, and probably not as great for gaming (though I argue that the biggest thing holding back phone/tablet gaming is the limited storage - the high end 3D games seem to take ~1GB of storage).

      Comparing to the Nexus 7 is interesting - the Nexus 7 has better specs, but this tablet has the elusive microSD slot (and comes with 3G at a cheaper price), as well as being thinner. And although the resolution is lower, 1024x768 is at least better than the 1024x600 that a lot of budget tablets seem to be going for.

      And in some ways, the problem is that you don't necessarily get what you pay for - at the moment, I don't think any tablet is perfect, no matter how much you spend (possibly the Note 8 might just about be there - one of the most expensive 7-8" tablets, but it doesn't make any compromises, unlike every other tablet in that size range - though the resolution may look outdated if Google up the Nexus 7's resolution to Full HD...)

  2. Shagbag

    Pants.

  3. Babbit55

    I have had a cheap unbranded Tablet before for sub £150, it was plagued with issues. Half the time you couldn't get wireless, it crashed randomly and the advertised 8 gig ended up being 4! It got returned for a full refund and I got a Nexus 7 instead, my personally experience would go with the old you get what you pay for.

    1. Danny 14
      Stop

      I got the kids a noname 50 ebay 7" ics tablet and it works just fine. Build quality is not approaching the tab 2 but for the price it rocks.

  4. Dr. Mouse

    "So what's it like for gaming? I've no idea, but I think we can guess."

    You could easily have done better than guess!!

    You have the tablet. You are reviewing it. Yet you can't be arsed to try a couple of games? It wouldn't have taken very long!

    1. Lamont Cranston
      Happy

      Maybe all reviews should be like this?

      "What's it like? No idea, but judging by the box, I award a score of 47%"

      Think of the time saved! With all these resources freed up from this "journalism" nonsense, LOHAN could be on the moon, by now.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      So what's it like for gaming?

      Installing something like Dead Trigger and playing a level or two would have been the work of a few minutes.

      Be nice to know how it works with HD video too, either local hosted (720p MKV? 1080p MP4?) or streamed from YouTube. Will it play video streamed from the Google Play Video store?

      Saying the Kobo/Kindle/Play Books apps work is pointless - even the most dated and gutless 'droid device will run them.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    new wave coming

    funny to see the no-names from China leading the pack, as the 3G seems to edging slowly, from the margins, towards a "standard" feature. In fact, there are already several models available in Europe for up to £200 quid (equivalent of), and some of them are not bad at all.

  6. thesykes

    for not much more...

    Got a Nexus 7 wi-fi, then picked up a brand new mi-fi off eBay (looked like T-mobile had been giving them out like sweets, judging by how many were for sale at the time), only cost me £23. Couple of quid for an unlock code. Job done.

    Now got 3G when I need it, and can hook up a laptop, phones etc., which is useful when the phone 3G signal is hopeless and the mi-fi network is stronger.

    Don't have the mi-fi with me? Just tether the phone, one widget press, thanks to Widgetsoid.

    1. Rebajas
      Meh

      Re: for not much more...

      Got a Nexus 7 3G - and a Three SIM for £7.50 a month... no extra devices to carry around and keep charged, just always connected. Job done.

      1. thesykes

        Re: for not much more...

        true, but, this review is for a £150 tablet, a Nexus 7 16Gb is £159, so is close to the same price, the 3G version is much more.

    2. FlossyThePig

      Re: for not much more...

      A colleague bought a Nook HD 8GB for £119. Slipped in a microSD card with a £10 software hack. Ended up with a 7" tablet with full android (not the locked down B&N version) and a resolution of 1440x900.

    3. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: for not much more...

      >Don't have the mi-fi with me? Just tether the phone, one widget press, thanks to Widgetsoid

      That's alright for many of us, but where I see affordable 7"+ 3G tablets being useful is for people like my old man who much prefer their old Nokia candy-bar or a cheap flip-phone to a touch-screen smart-phone. Small cheap phone with big buttons and a long battery life, plus a cheap tablet to live in the glovebox- a good combo for some!

      I guess the bottom line to this review is: is it worth stretching to the extra £35 for a Nexus 7 3G?

  7. Andrew Moore
    Thumb Up

    Disgo...

    ...where probably the first company to gain any success with USB drives. I think I have a 32mbyte somewhere around here.

  8. Berwhale

    The Asus Fonepad is out on Friday for £180 (it's available for pre-order from Amazon). The Fonepad has slots for both a SIM and a microSD card. I'm seriously considering upgrading my Nexus 7.

    1. Mick Stranahan
      Thumb Up

      FonePad

      Ditto. For the price it looks like a very nice bit of kit.

  9. Johnny Canuck

    I can almost picture these 7" pads with SIM slot being the video phones many have been waiting for.

    1. Steven Raith
      WTF?

      "the video phones many have been waiting for"

      ....what people?

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: "the video phones many have been waiting for"

        People who work overseas and people whose grandchildren live some distance away, for starters.

        I haven't used video calling myself, but my old house-mate was a French engineer working in the UK, and he used it quite regularly.

        1. Steven Raith

          Re: "the video phones many have been waiting for"

          I've always used computers for video calling - much better video compression.

          Mind you, a Nexus 4 on Gchat can push what looks like 480p video in near real time over wifi.

          Phones are *finally* getting there....

  10. Lusty

    Do any networks still provide "full size SIMs" these days? If the article is correct then this device might be useless!

    1. FlossyThePig
      Headmaster

      Wake up at the back!

      Yes is the answer. Micro SIMs are supplied as a press out component of full size SIMs

    2. reno79

      You can buy converters on eBay for about a quid that take either nano or micro sims and make them full size

    3. Dave 126 Silver badge

      A 'full size SIM' is about the size of a credit card, and I haven't seen one in a phone since about 1998. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e0/GSM_SIM_card_evolution.svg/400px-GSM_SIM_card_evolution.svg.png

      But yeah, we know what you mean.

  11. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

    That SoC...

    The MSM8625 is a dual core Cortex-A5, although every other source suggests the SoC is actually an MSM 8225, which is 200Mhz slower.

    THAT, in conjunction with the Adreno 203 mentioned in the article, is exactly why its performance is so weak.

  12. Alain

    Correction: Ultimate Rotation Control isn't a free app

    It's an excellent little app that does the job nicely and I have bought it. It's cheap, but it isn't free

  13. Steve Evans

    "Disgo quotes 512MB of RAM but apparently this is shared with the Adreno 203 GPU, with the system info showing around 384MB left for the CPU."

    There's your bottle neck. My old mobile has enough of a problem running Gingerbread with that amount of RAM, let alone Jellybean.

    If they'd just been a bit less tight and spent a couple more $ to make it 1gig, and it might have been a contender.

  14. David Gosnell

    I've heard of Disgo

    Oh yes... Had one of their mp3 players for about a day, if I remember rightly. That should say it all.

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