Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue Review

Introduction

The Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue stands out with a feature rarely found on tablets nowadays. It is capable of making phone calls thanks to its cellular radio and built-in earpiece. This means it could potentially serve as a smartphone replacement, although we'd say it would be much more suitable as a secondary handset. But of course, the Vogue is a full-fledged Android device as well. You get a 7-inch screen, quad-core processor, and a pair of cameras, all packed inside a premium aluminum body. Not bad of a package, don't you think? Well, let's not draw any conclusions yet as the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue isn't exactly the ultimate Android tablet. Read on to learn why.

In the box:

• Wall charger
• Micro USB cable
• Quick start guide
• Warranty card

Design

We must admit that the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue actually looks and feels quite nice. Seriously, can you think of another Android slate that sports an aluminum back plate? We are satisfied with the tablet's build quality as we find no squeaky parts or loose seems. At 335 grams, the MediaPad 7 Vogue is of average weight for its size and it is comfortable to hold thanks to its rounded corners. All buttons and ports situated around its sides are easily accessible.

Display

Without a doubt, sacrifices had to be made in order to keep the production costs of the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue down. Display quality has been one of them, unfortunately. The tablet has a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen with a mediocre resolution of 600 by 1024 pixels, which explains why graphics and text displayed on it lack detail. Although the panel is made using IPS-LCD technology, its colors aren't exactly accurate as they lean towards the warmer side. We had difficulties using the tablet outdoors as the screen's surface reflects a lot of light and fingerprints stick to it very easily.

Interface

Like it or not, the Android 4.1.2 build running on the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue has been modified from its original form. The company's very own EmotionUI 1.5 comes loaded out of the box, bringing both major and minor alterations affecting the overall user experience. One of them is the lack of an app drawer; every app that is installed has its icon placed straight on the home screen, from where it can be grouped with others in a folder if needed. This is supposedly meant to make the UI simpler, yet we don't want to imagine what having 218 apps loaded onto the device would look like.

We like that the notification panel is placed at the bottom corner where it is closer to the user's thumb. Also, it is nice that the camera, dialer, and messaging apps can be launched straight from the lock screen via shortcuts that are permanently placed there.

What we're frustrated with, on the other hand, is that the UI can be unresponsive. If your tap is even slightly off-center, tapping on an app icon won't launch it.

By default, most of the home screen is occupied by the Me Widget, which combines several smaller widgets into one. These mini widgets can be customized, removed, or reorganized, depending on what features the user needs most frequently. Unfortunately, while the widget does come in handy quite often, it is the root of performance issues we experienced constantly during testing. Each time the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue is rotated, this widget has to be redrawn, causing an unacceptable lag of at least a second. Eventually, we removed it from our home screen.

The Huawei on-screen keyboard feels okay, but it isn't the best we've ever tried. Nevertheless, after a few minutes of practice, we could type comfortably on it regardless of its orientation. We find the built-in gestures for quick input of symbols and numbers pretty neat. Still, a split layout in addition to the default one would have been nice having.

Processor and memory

The K3V2 system-on-chip, or a variation of it, is found in many of Huawei's recent devices, including the MediaPad 7 Vogue. It sports a 1.2GHz quad-core CPU and a 16-core GPU, which seems like a decent hardware combo when paired with 1GB of RAM. However, we simply can't describe the user experience as smooth, especially with the issue we described above. Sometimes the tablet runs just fine, but then suddenly, the UI would get choppy and would lag when exiting or switching between apps. At least most of the games we tested ran fine, although some of the the heavier titles run at poor frame rates.

Even light users will find the 8GB of on-board storage insufficient as only about 4.7GB of it are free. Thankfully, there's a microSD card for adding up to 32 gigs extra.

Internet browser and connectivity

The stock internet browser on the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue takes some time to load heavy pages, but once that's done, the app handles them well. Zooming, scrolling, and other navigation gestures are smooth and respond accurately to the user's touch input. But on a low-res screen like this, text in web pages is nearly impossible to read without zooming in, and that spoils the whole web browsing experience. Feature-wise, the browser hasn't been tweaked and comes with just the standard set of tools, such as support for multiple tabs, embedded YouTube videos, and saving pages for offline use.

One thing we don't see often on a tablet is a cellular radio capable of making regular phone calls. The Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue does have one of these and it happens to be among its stand-out features. It will also get you online at HSPA+ rates of up to 42Mbps. GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi with DLNA support are also on board.

Camera

There's no point in getting into details here as the cameras on the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue are extremely basic. The main snapper has only 3.2MP of resolution and its focus is fixed, which is why we're not surprised to see that its photos are very low on detail. On top of that, the cam boots slowly, taking at least a couple of seconds to load. The front-facing camera of 0.3MP is also barely passable. Sure, there are filters and several shooting modes available to experiment with, but don't count on these to make your photos look any better. Videos, taken at a maximum resolution of 720p, are choppy and suffer from the same lack of detail as the cam's still images.

Multimedia

Google's Play Music player comes loaded out of the box, but alternatively, you may use Huawei's Music+ player app. The latter is rather simple, but it has all the basic functionality we've come to expect out of a music player application, such as sorting our library and providing us with lock screen controls. But the lack of an equalizer is puzzling. In addition, there is a tab where songs can be downloaded or streamed over the internet for absolutely free. However, they are all by Chinese artists, so we can't say that the feature is of much use to non-Chinese users.

We're happy to say that the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue could easily play any 1080p video sample we tested on it. Videos run smoothly, without dropping a frame, and rewinding or fast-forwarding happens in an instant. There's an option to have the video player running in a window hovering above the UI, which is a feature that may come in handy.

There is a single loudspeaker on the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue. Its volume output and sound quality are nothing beyond average and if you're, let's say, watching a YouTube video in a place noisier than a coffee shop, then you might have troubles hearing the dialogue. What makes matters worse is that it is placed on the back of the device instead of facing the user.

Call quality

As we mentioned on the previous page, the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue can make phone calls as it has an earpiece, microphone, and a 3G cellular radio. And the quality of the calls is acceptable: the earpiece is loud enough and sounds natural. However, the microphone could have been better as the other party described the sound as not sounding natural.

Battery life

There is a 4100mAh non-removable battery inside the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue. The manufacturer claims that it should provide 20 hours of continuous talk time on a single charge, or 6 hours of video playback. During our testing, we noticed that the cell got drained rather quickly, so don't expect much out of it. Keeping the screen brightness low and activating the power saver mode should extend the tablet's battery life.

Conclusion

Unless you absolutely must have a tablet that can make phone calls, we'd advise you to pass on the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue. Sure, it seems like a decent Android slate at first glance, but the more we use it, the more we get turned off by it. What bothers us the most is that the Vogue feels sluggish at times and its UI is way too rough around the edges. And if that's not enough, a screen with resolution as low as this just isn't acceptable at this point in time.

An alternative that can make phone calls as well is the Asus Fonepad – an inexpensive Android tablet of the same build quality and overall size. But if the feature isn't required, it would be much wiser to pick the 2013 Google Nexus 7 tablet as it is superior to the Huawei MediaPad 7 Vogue in almost every way imaginable. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 8.0 is another option worth considering – with a bigger, better screen, capable hardware, and a reasonable price tag.

Version: Android 4.1.2, EmotionUI 1.5
BUILD: S7-601uV100R001C001B009