Dixons Advent Vega

What I want to know is:

Can it play films from NAS?

Twixt and tween

I was debating buying an Advent Vega, but decided against it. Partly because at the moment, it's not that competitively priced - you can buy a no-name 10" Android tablet from Ebay from as little as £100 and Apple/Currys/Comet/etc are punting out v1 iPads for as little as £329 - with free laser etching, to boot. Admittedly, the prices will go back up once the v1 stocks are cleared and the v2 is released, but I'd expect the secondhand price of an iPad v1 to be around the £250 mark once things have settled.

Instead, I went for one of the no-name tablets, at £130 - it's a ZT-180 v2, if anyone's interested. The specs aren't quite as good (1ghz single-core unnamed CPU, resistive screen), but it's generally comparable on all other features: 10.1" 1024*600 screen, USB host, micro-sd, HDMI-out, 1080p media playback, 512mb ram, 4gb flash and 3-5 hours of battery life. And there's a reasonable number of people playing around with ROM upgrades for this specific model.

Assuming the build quality is alright and the battery life lives up to expectations, it's cheap and portable enough for me to be happy using it as a media-viewer on my daily train-travel. However, in the long run, I'll probably end up grabbing a secondhand iPad V1, once the secondhand models are down enough in price - I'm not keen on the closed-garden philosophy or the lack of a memory card slot, but the battery life is outstanding and that 4:3 screen ratio is much, much more sensible for reading!

For those who don't know about the dept of technical expertise of Dixons staff.

Hers is a brief training film for one of their earlier products.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pujXTj4X_I4

If ye don't like it...

...send it my way! :) I'll root it and installed honeycomb, and detail my experiences. I'd love a chance to play with this device...but they won't ship to Canada!

Tradeoffs

USB and a Micro-SD slot: that's good to have. 4GB Micro-SD cards seem to be the default: you can buy 'em in Tesco. Smarter people get 16GB cards off the web.

If only there were the software easily available to exploit these features. It almost seems to be going in the opposite direction to the iPad.

Screen

@Kingsley - I almost bought one the other day- reserved in store and everything - but the screen left me feeling distinctly unimpressed. The resolution and colour reproduction just seems well below par - even for a cheapo like this I was expection a bit more.

meh

I'll stick with my GT, small and with the same resolution, classier looking, works a treat without having to update the ROM (although I await a quality ROM from Modaco seeing as I'm a paid up member).

Actually made by Malata, Dixons just sell them

Dixon's Advent badge is stuck on a bunch of items made by third parties you've mostly never heard of, often cheap crap. Sometimes it strikes (still cheap) gold though and sells it at an astonishing price, e.g. the Advent netbook which was a rebrand of the MSI Wind. This Malata tablet is a similar story.

The Advent Vega has been a great tablet for those lucky enough to buy one a few months ago and do the Modaco stuff to bring it up to scratch. But yes, the lack of the Google Market and Flash has hampered it's acceptability for the average punter.

This will change with Honeycomb, as you'll note that due to a change in Google policies it is being punted on several items e.g. the upcoming Galaxy Tabs and the Xooms that don't have 3G or phone capabilites which means the out of the box experience will be fine from that point onwards. Particularly as the Tegra2 platform of the Vega is the reference platform that all those Honeycomb tablets are running. It is likely, but not guaranteed that the current Vegas will be sold with Honeycomb at some point.

For those who are geekier you might want to wait for the slightly newer models that Malata have already announced, to see if you get slightly better screen and minor bumps in other specs, possibly at even lower prices if you're prepared to wait and see if Dixons pick them up or get them via some other route. (Google for "Malata Honeycomb" for details).

For the flashing fearful

http://mobilestore.opera.com/

but flashing is so easy!

Ipad or vega or maplin scroll ?

I had a Vega and found it to be rubbish, The screen is a joke , I now have a Maplin scroll with 2.1 and that has better veiwing angles than the vega. The archos 101 was even worse. but that was reduced in Currys.digital as it was a customer return and went down more than a working girls knickers

I've had 2 ipad's so far in a week only returned due to first having major backlight bleeding and second just started to corrupt my music, which i did a restore on and it just gave up

so not getting a third.

took wife out spent some of the refund money and ended up with the maplin scroll.

The touch screen is a joke but it does play videos well. nice clear screen

the battery does under 2 hours, and only cost £30 less than My used Motorola Defy thanks CEX

Claims to have open GL2 support but very few games run right on it bits missing etc. Also having to turn the thing 180% to get it the right way up.

I have rooted g1 and san francisco etc and its easy in most cases, but as the vega's backlight was faulty, it was strippy light and dark. it had to go back.

Want unlimited net etc use O2 based spin off giffgaff

Why compare to iPad

Why bother comparing to the iPad at all? It is clear that Android tablets - while sharing a form factor - are completely different beasts to the iFamily. iOS gives you a locked-down ecosystem, but provides many features out of the box and has a consistent user interface. Android may seem lacking at first, but if you're prepared to roll your sleeves up and do a little work yourself, you'll get a far more rewarding experience and a far better device.

Hell, you don't even have to get your hands dirty with the Vega. Modaco have done - literally - all the work for you; all the end user needs to do is download a zip file, change one setting and run a program. Get yourself a nice cuppa, let it flash & reboot, then you're done. Chances are that you won't even finish making that cuppa before it's rebooted into the Modaco ROM.

I don't read el reg/reghardware to get the "consumer" point of view, I read it for a more tech-savvy opinion. The nice friendly padded corners you get with iOS may be just fine and dandy for the masses, but that's not what computing is about to me. I want the sharp corners that I can gouge my shins on (scars are cool, right?), I want to be able to screw up and learn from my mistakes, I want the endless customisations, the custom kernels/modules, etc.

After spending about 5 minutes in the Modaco forums, I knew this review was way off and decided that I would be getting one. Especially when it has been pretty much confirmed that the Vega will be getting Honeycomb. Manufacturers of vega clones have already confirmed that they are working on releasing Honeycomb; we don't even need a 100% open source homebrew effort, because there will be official builds to work on that are already optimised for the hardware.

A Honeycomb-capable tablet for half the price (yet the same hardware power) of the Xoom? Yes-bloody-please.