Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite Review

Introduction:

The Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite is an affordable 7-inch Android tablet, and that puts in a category as vast as the ocean. Surrounded by affordable devices like the $199 Nexus 7 tablet and a myriad of cheaper slates from white box manufacturers, Huawei with the MediaPad has a daunting task, if it wants to succeed.

Huawei is bringing an aluminum unibody, an IPS display, 3G and Google’s Play Store (you might take it for granted, but at those low prices some Chinese makers are easily omitting it!).

But apart from that, the MediaPad is far from being a dream device. Let’s see if Huawei made just enough or too many compromises, and whether this device deserves our recommendation.

Design:

Design on a tablet is an easy and hard task at the same time. Hard because most of the front space is occupied by the screen and you have to get really creative if you want to create something drastically different, and easy because we’ve already seen the right way to go - thin and light. Sadly, the Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite is not as light as its name implies (it weighs 0.82 pounds), and is far from thin at 0.43 inches (11mm).


A couple of months ago, we would excuse that with the price, but now that the Nexus 7 has set the design bar so high at $199, the thick profile of the Huawei tablet comes as a disappointment.


The Chinese company has chosen aluminum for the back cover and that’s a good thing. The tablet comes with a unibody design that is only interrupted by two strips of white plastic on top and bottom, where Huawei is placing the connectivity chips. We love the feeling of rigidity aluminum radiates. Still, at the places where the aluminum stitches with the plastic, you’d notice the plastic wavers, disrupting the even aluminum surface. We don’t know whether that’s a build quality issue on our unit only or something more widespread, we’d just keep it in mind.


Screen:

The MediaPad 7 Lite sports a 7-inch 1024 x 600-pixel, capacitive IPS display. This guarantees good viewing angles, accurate colors and overall quick response time. Colors don’t get washed out even at the more extreme angles. Pixel density comes at 170ppi which is okay for this size. For the average user, this type of pixel density means decent reading experience, but if you want to make out the smallest of fonts without zooming in, you might need a higher res display like the 1280 x 800-pixel one on the Nexus 7.

Colorwise, we were happy with the deep blacks and nice contrast ratio on the display. It’s reasonably bright, but you’d still have difficulties using it outdoors in sunny weather.

Interface and Functionality:

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich comes with little modifications made by Huawei and that’s mostly a good thing. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And in this case it isn’t.


In Huawei’s case, in terms of ICS modifications, we’ve only noticed that the company has included its DLNA file-sharing app as a bonus, and not much else. On a 7-inch tablet, you get to benefit from split screen functionality in apps like the native mail client and calendar. In mail for example you can have two panes, one with the list of emails and another one with the actual content of an email.


Interestingly, the Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite is one of the few tablets that also comes with a full-on phone functionality. You can insert your SIM card in a conveniently placed slot on the side and use not just cellular data on the go, but also make and take calls like you do on a standard Android handset save for one important detail – there is no earpiece. And that in turn means that you are forced to either use the loudspeaker or hook up the tablet to a headset for more privacy.


We doubt there is much practical application to the phone function in a tablet, but in an imaginary scenario where your phone battery dies, you’d be able to simply plug in phone’s SIM card into the tablet and make that important call.

Processor and Memory:

If we were to point out a single feature that we’d replace in the MediaPad, that without a second thought would be the 1.2GHz single-core Cortex A8 processor. We do need to account for the low price and all the compromises that have to be made, but we noticed stutter way too often to ignore.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	NenaMark 2
Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite	1093	2637	20,8
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0)	2750	5144	30,2
Lenovo IdeaPad A2109	4011	10769	53,9

We don’t remember seeing such low benchmark tests in quite a while even on more affordable products. While benchmarks don’t always tell the whole story, arriving at the extreme low-end here is telling.

The tablet comes with 8GB of internal storage which can be expanded via a microSD card. The card slot is neatly situated on the side, so you can hot swap cards (change them without rebooting).

Internet and Connectivity:

Accessing the web happens via the built-in Android browser application or through a variety of other browsers available on the Play Store. Since Adobe Flash does not show up in the app catalog, we’d prefer using a browser like Chrome that syncs up your mobile and desktop experiences. In both browsers, performance was good. We found panning around smooth, and pinch to zoom also worked perfectly without a stutter.

3G connectivity is what justifies the price for this tablet.

In addition, you have Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS and Bluetooth 3.0 rounding up the package.

Camera:

The MediaPad features a 3.2-megapixel fixed-focus rear camera. The quality of the images is passable, but not great. The images lack detail. When it comes to color accuracy, though, images are mostly true-to-life, getting only slightly too agressive with punchy vivid colors occasionally.


Video is recorded at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, at 24 frames per second. There is one nasty issue with it - it can’t get its white balance right at all. You’d find it skipping between yellowish and more natural tones every couple of seconds. That practically renders the captured footage unusable.

Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite Sample Video:



On the front side of the tablet, there is a VGA camera. It is a low-res affair, with no bigger aspirations than to fit those times when you are on a video call.

Multimedia:

While it’s not a top camera performer, the MediaPad Lite has a 7-inch IPS screen and that’s a big asset for playing back video, and multimedia in general. The 1.2GHz single-core processor had no problem churning through 720p video.

Audio playback happens via a single loudspeaker situated on the back of the tablet, right near the camera. Sound through it comes out loud and clear, the only slight issue is that it gets muffled when you place the tablet on a table or somewhere because it’s in the back.

Battery and Performance:

There is a 4,100mAh battery dealing with the 7 incher’s energy hunger. It is rated to last around only four to five hours, and we found that’s around as much as we got on it in actuality.

Conclusion:

Let’s be honest, the Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite is one of a few tablets that lost much of its appeal after Google launched the Nexus 7. This is a review, not a comparison, but in this case the difference is so obvious, we can’t simply turn a blind eye to the 7-inch Nexus as the most obvious competitor.

The good about the MediaPad is the fact that it delivers 3G and phone functionality at a relatively affordable price. The tablet sells for $260, and you can just pop in a SIM card, and be ready to go. Storage is also easily expandable via microSD.

But then come the problems. The more we look at it, the more clear is our realization that Android 4.1 Jelly Bean obliterates Ice Cream Sandwich in a radical way. Big specs like a quad-core chip can cover up a bit, but with the paltry 1.2GHz single-core Cortex A8 processor on the MediaPad, stutter happens more often than we find acceptable.

The unibody design is also passable, but slight issues with build quality and the thickness of the tablet undermine it. And that’s our overall impression with the Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite - passable. It’s up to you if you can settle for that, but if you don’t absolutely need the 3G connectivity and phone function, it’s hard to imagine why you’d pick it over, say, a Nexus 7.

Huawei MediaPad 7 Lite Video Review: