Mercury mTab Neo Review

Capacitive screen is not too bad when browsing

Browsing the Internet is not too bad with the stock browser and the capacitive screen lets you easily zoom in and out of web pages. The dual-core CPU and 512MB RAM ensure pages load quickly and scrolling through them is quick and painless.

Misc. Apps
In terms of extra apps, we have Advanced Task Manager and Skype. There’s also ES File Explorer and a slightly tweaked video player.

Camera
The camera sensor is just a 2MP, but the quality is really bad. The lack of auto-focus makes it even worse. The interface is possibly the worst that we’ve come across in any Android device. You barely get any options for tinkering around with. Only things you can change are the megapixel count, the video quality and the picture quality.

Extremely barren with no options to tweak the picture

The is the best we could get

Video recording is present, but it’s only upto VGA and the frame rate is very choppy as well. The quality of the video is very grainy with plenty of noise creeping in. Suffice to say, this is not one of its strong suits.

Battery Life
The same 4000mAh battery is fitted in the Tab Neo as well, but this time we managed to get slightly more mileage in our video drain tests. We managed to get a good 5hrs and 30min and our loop tests revealed a battery life of 5hrs and 10min. This is not too shabby, considering the tablet is sporting a dual-core CPU this time.

Verdict
At Rs.16,000, we can’t help, but feel it’s quite an expensive proposition for a 7-inch tablet. The Tab Neo does improve a bit from the older version by adding a dual-core CPU and 3G SIM card support, but the jump in price isn’t justified. They’ve also gone one step back by adding Froyo, instead of Gingerbread, which really puzzles us. In the end, the Mercury Tab Neo brings back most of the issues we faced with the first one and leaves us disappointed.