LAVA E Tab Z7H Review

Android tablets in the Indian market seem to be gaining momentum because of cheap prices and competition from other manufacturers in the same segment. Newer tablets are seen entering the market but most of them feature almost the same hardware specs. Today we have the LAVA E Tab, a 7-inch Android tablet with us and the tablet impressed us to quite an extent when compared to others we have reviewed in the recent past. Let’s take you through the entire feature set and the performance of this tablet to know if it is worth a buy.

Crisp 7-Inch display, 480 x 800 pixels

Design and Build quality

Comparing other 7-inch tablets in a similar price range, the LAVA E Tab seems to be made of a superior build quality and sports a good look. The shell is rugged and firm and has a completely matt-finished exterior, promising a longer lasting aesthetics. The front panel features an inlaid 7-inch display panel, a front facing VGA camera and a speaker grille on the left side. The front panel has no capacitive or physical buttons for Home, Back or Search as they are featured in the Operating System itself using the display panel. The rear panel has absolutely nothing except for a sober company logo and a product model number, and this makes the tablet look very neat. A volume rocker, Home and Power buttons are placed on the top. The right side features the power jack and audio jack, the microSD card slot and a micro USB PC interface that doubles as a USB host when used along with the bundled micro USB host cable. The tablet is 11.9 mm thick and weighs 350 grams, but still feels lighter and less bulky than most other tablets.

Rear panel has absolutely nothing and is pretty neat

Features and Performance

The E Tab from LAVA does not sport any powerful hardware, but still functions very smoothly. It is built using a 1.2GHz Cortex-A8 processor, but surprisingly, every system information utility we used on it reported the tablet being clocked at 1008MHz instead of 1200MHz. It is supported by 512MB of RAM and a MALI-400 GPU. The Operating System is Android ICS 4.0.3 and the internal storage is 4GB, of which around 2GB is reserved for the ROM and internal app installation and the rest is free for the user to store his or her data. This storage can be expanded via a microSD card to a maximum of 32GB. The 7-inch display, even though it features a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, gives out more vibrant and crisper picture quality as compared to earlier tablets in the same price bracket. 

Android ICS v4.0.3

We ran our usual benchmarks to check the performance of this tablet. Linpack resulted in 15.13 MFLOPS in single thread test and 13.48 MFLOPS in the multi-thread test. Quadrant gave us a score of 2784, AnTuTu gave us 2972 while NenaMark spewed 25.5 fps. Comparing this tablet to the rest of the 7-inchers we reviewed in the past, we found it performing a tad faster by around 8-10 percent. 

1008MHz processor, 512MB RAM, MALI-400 GPU

Interface

The user interface, as we mentioned, is pretty smooth and fluid. There was no lag or sluggish feel whatsoever even after using it for a while too long—thanks to the GPU onboard. The stock tablet interface has no fancy icons or unwanted widgets and wall papers installed. The multi-touch screen recognises up to five simultaneous touch inputs and is very sensitive and responsive.