ZenFocus myZenTab 708BH Review

Tablet PCs are soon changing the way people communicate and entertain themselves on the move, and 7-inch budget Android tablets seem to be highly welcomed by the Indian market. We have reviewed a large number of budget 7-inch Android tablets in the recent past and while many disappointed us, a few did manage to steal our hearts. This time again, we have on our bench an Android 7-incher by a new entrant in the market. The myZenTab 708BH is a tablet brought to you by ZenFocus, which is an asset and service management solutions company. Do not confuse it with Zen Corporation, which brings you a range of mobile phones and tablets. Let us update you about this new entrant and if it is worth investing on.

Android ICS, 1GHz processor, MALI-400 GPU, 512MB RAM

Design and Build

As per the manufacturer, the myZenTab 708BH is built using a metal shell, but it doesn’t seem like it. The rear panel is completely made of plastic and the frame could be metal. The exterior has a matte-finished steel-grey colour, which looks like it is made of metal, but is not. The tablet is around 11.7 mm thick and weighs about 347 grams. The shell is firm and rugged but not as sturdy as one would expect. The front panel sports the 7-inch display along with a front facing VGA camera and three capacitive touch buttons for Home, Back and Menu. The volume rocker and power/standby buttons take their place on the top, while the right side sports all the necessary interfaces. These include the power and headphone sockets, a microSD card slot, the mini USB PC interface and a mini HDMI port. Alongside these interfaces is a tiny hole for the microphone and a small window for the speaker grille. The rear is a plain back with a curved surface and features only the necessary port names and the company logo. 

The rear panel...no speakers

Features

The 708BH is powered by the Allwinner Boxchip A10 chipset SOC, which is codenamed as Sun4i Crane. The processor is an ARMv7 clocked at 1GHz and uses the MALI-400 GPU for acceleration. The RAM supplied is 512MB, while the internal storage is a good 8GB. However, of this 8GB internal storage, 5.35GB is available for user data and 1GB is reserved for app installation. The display is the regular 7-inch LCD screen seen on all the 7-inchers around and has a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. The front-facing camera is a 0.3 MP. The operating system installed on the 708BH is Android ICS. Connectivity options are Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and 3G support via USB dongles. Lastly, the battery supplied inside is a 3200 mAh battery, which the manufacturer claims is capable of giving you at least a 5-hour runtime. The 708BH has a similar variant in the family—the 708B, which is a slightly downscaled version of the former. It features identical specs except for the Box A10 chipset, half the built-in storage, a lower rated battery and a plastic shell in place of metal. It is also thinner and cheaper than the 708BH.

8GB storage, Wi-fi, 3G and Ethernet via USB OTG dongle

User interface

As we mentioned earlier, the 708BH uses the Android ICS 4.0.x operating system with the stock interface. Though the tablet uses 1GB of RAM and a MALI-400 GPU, the user interface is a tad sluggish. The sensitivity of the touchscreen seems like it is the culprit for the under-performing UI. We did try to tweak all possible settings, but it does not improve the performance of the UI. Moving on, the 708BH has only a twitter app thrown in with no other freebie apps, unlike other budget tablet manufacturers who flood the app drawer with too many useless apps. This makes the UI a bit lighter and less cluttered and gives the user some more free space to install app of his or her choice.