Mitashi Play BE 200 Review

The competition for the cheapest and best 7-inch budget Android tablet seems to be sizzling. A few manufacturers are bringing in larger screens and in the similar budget space, giving the 7-inchers a run for their money. Micromax Funbook Pro, the 10-incher we reviewed recently, is priced at Rs 9,999. Bringing the budget even further down is the 9-incher Play BE 200 from a new entrant in the tablet zone, but old player of electronic equipment, Mitashi. Let us have a closer look at this tablet.

9-inch display with 800 x 480 pixels, 1GHz CPU and 512MB RAM

Design and build

The Mitashi Play BE 200 is a 9-inch Android tablet that closely resembles the Micromax Funbook Pro to quite an extent. It is around 12 mm thick and weighs just a little over half a kilo (510 grams), but does not feel as heavy. The tablet looks very sleek and is good-looking with an all-black exterior, but it has a very glossy surface, which is prone to scratches and fingerprints. A bundled sleeve would have helped to an extent, but sadly, you would need to purchase one for this tablet. The front panel has no buttons except for a large 9-inch display panel and a front facing camera placed on the top right corner. The rear panel sports a single speaker and a slot for the microSD card. The right side features a micro USB PC interface that doubles as a USB OTG slot for external peripherals. Also seen on the right are the audio jack, power socket and a power switch. The volume and back buttons are assigned to the top. The entire chassis is very firm and lightweight and feels nice to handle.  

High-gloss rear panel with a single speaker grille

Features and performance

The Play BE 200 runs on the Google Android ICS V4.0.4 operating system and is powered by a Cortex A8 1GHz Boxchip A13 processor, a MALI-400 graphics processor and 512MB of RAM. The internal storage capacity is 4GB. Do note that the official Mitashi website specifies the product as having 8GB of internal storage, which is misleading. The manual inside the product box states 4GB of storage and the product itself has 4GB of internal storage, which is shared between the ROM, apps storage and user data. The display is a decent 9-inch sporting a resolution of 800 x 480—we did expect to see a larger display with a better resolution, but were disappointed again. A VGA camera is available in the front for video calls. What we noticed here is a missing mini HDMI port and a Bluetooth interface, which could be one reason for the price bargain. 

12 mm thick, 510 grams

We tested the Play BE 200 to check the performance to compare it with other tablets with the same chipset and speed using our regular benchmarking apps. AnTuTu scored 2985 while Quadrant gave us scores of 2336. Linpack scored 14.56 MFLOPS in single-thread tests and 13.73 MFLOPS in multi-thread tests. Lastly, Nenamark2 gave us frame rates of 27.1 fps in its test. Even though the product is equipped with a 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, the BE 200 is at par with the Micromax Funbook Pro in terms of performance. 

No HDMI port

Connectivity

On the connectivity front, the Mitashi Play BE 200 comes with a micro USB PC interface that doubles as a USB OTG interface to connect external USB peripherals such as a USB storage drive or a keyboard or mouse. However, you would need to opt for an OTG cable, as Mitashi has not bundled one with it. The micro USB slot can also be used to charge the tablet, which is a plus point for the tablet as you won't need to carry an additional charger for the tablet separately. Lastly, you can connect the tablet to the Internet via the Wireless 802.11 b/g/n interface or by using a 3G Internet dongle via the OTG feature.