BSNL Penta T-Pad WS703C Review

Four months ago, we reviewed the BSNL Penta T-Pad WS802C, which was priced at Rs 14,700 because of the SIM card 3G and calling support. The product is still available on its website with a new price tag of Rs 11,024. This time, BSNL has brought in another similar product with a low price of Rs 6,999, but has cut down a number of features to bring down the price to an affordable zone without compromising on the 3G SIM card support. Let us check what the differences are.

7-inch display, 800 x 480 pixels

Design and build

The BSNL Penta T-Pad has a very firm and sturdy shell with a glossy silver coating that can easily get scratched. If placed on a rough surface, or handled badly, you can end up with a tarnished tablet in no time. Fortunately, BSNL has bundled along a free sleeve to protect the tablet whilst travelling. The rear panel has a large logo of BSNL Penta, which is a put off as it looks more like an advertisement that covers up almost 30 percent of the entire area. The front panel has three capacitive touch buttons for Home, Back and Menu, and alongside is a battery status LED. The display panel is a 7-incher with a resolution of 480 x 800, which is similar to most tablets in this budget and size. The power and volume buttons take their place on the top while the right side features the power jack, microSD slot, mini HDMI port, a micro USB PC interface and the headphone jack. Two VGA cameras are available, one on the front and one on the rear. The rear panel also sports a mono speaker grille and the SIM card slot. 

Cluttered logos on the rear, silver glossy surface.

Features

The Penta T-Pad WS703C is based on the Android ICS operating system and runs on a single core 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor with a MALI-400 GPU accelerator. The RAM featured is 512MB while the built-in storage is the average 4GB. As usual, the storage can be expanded up to 32GB using a microSD card. The display panel is standard 7-inch capacitive LCD with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. Included by BSNL here are what other tablets in the similar price bracket do not offer as yet—Bluetooth. Bluetooth feature is a great advantage for casual data transfers and for enjoying wireless audio for music and videos. The tablet can be used for voice and video calls using the built-in SIM card or the wireless b/g/n interface. A micro USB port is available for the PC interface and doubles up as an OTG port. The tablet can also be charged via the micro USB port using a regular compatible phone charger. However, the charger provided with the tablet is a 2 A charger, which will charge the tablet faster than conventional 0.5 A and 1 A chargers used for mobile phones. Nevertheless, the micro USB charging feature is an advantage as you wouldn’t need to tag an additional charger around whilst you are on the go. 

Regular connectors similar to all Android tablets

Display

As mentioned earlier, the display is a 7-incher and sports a standard resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. We did notice that the display on the older WS802C we reviewed was much better as compared to this one—the display looks highly pixilated, a little washed-out on the colours front and lacks the sharpness and crisp picture quality we expected. Browsing the Internet or using the tablet for text work will make you notice the below average display quality within seconds. However, watching a video on the tablet speaks the other way—it is almost flawless. The video quality is good and crisp; you cannot notice any flaw in the display quality with regards to colour reproduction. 

3G SIM card slot on the rear towards the top

The viewing angles of the display are a bit bad though. Whilst watching a video or flipping through photos, you need to keep your viewing angle at a sharp 90 degrees. A slight deviation towards the bottom makes the display go darker and further more inverts the colours completely. You could miss the entire effects of the movie or photograph. We also noticed that the sensitivity of the capacitive display is a tad weak, and we witnessed it especially with the capacitive buttons on the front panel.