There’re Tabs and there’re are some devices on their way to become a proper Tab. While iPad and Galaxy Tab dominating the market and Optimus Pad, PlayBook, Xoom, Iconia, Flyer, Viewpad, Ziio and Slate peeking here and there, another half-blood-tablet has introduced to the market. Huawei IDEOS S7.
Huawei is a reputed company for producing data communication devices including high speed broadband dongles. They’re huge in communication arena, are they any good on producing tablets? Lets find out.
First things first. Build quality is absolutely impressive for a sub $300 device . Lets start from the housing. Speaker and volume control buttons available on the left hand side.
Another speaker, Micro USB connector and power connector port is available on the right hand side.
Micro SD memory card slot and a proprietary connector is available on front bottom side of the device. This supports up to 32GB of Micro SD card.
3.5mm headphone jack and power button is available on rear up side.
It weighs around half a kilo, that is more weight and thickness than Samsung Galaxy Tab. If you’re planning to use this as a eBook reader, you’ll need an armored hand to hold it without going numb.
7” TFT resistive 256K colors screen might be look good in the specs of a devices which came around 2008, but now it’s totally outdated. Screen response is ok but comparing with capacitive, it’s totally out of the league.
While browsing through home screens the screen’s less responsiveness become highly noticeable. Also lightweight clicks on the screen didn’t registered well requiring us to press harder.
Screen resolution is much lower than other competitors so I wont review this for HD video quality.
Although it lacks the crispiness, I must admit that external speakers are loud on music playback. For movies and video playback it does the job, but that’s all.
Beware you’ll need a hands-free to take calls, otherwise everybody can hear what comes out of external speakers.
Primary camera is a 2 MP without AF or flash. I’m not going to talk about the camera or live view quality on the screen. Just forget there is a front facing camera.
On the front face panel to the left side there are home, menu and back buttons available. These buttons are not touch sensitive, so it needs to press harder. While working on the device you’ll definitely get a weird feeling on the soft touch on screen and hard press on the buttons.
On the right side there are front facing camera, green call button, red end call button and an optical track pad for page and menu navigation. Dedicated call / end keys are a nice touch as well optical track pad works smoothly. But all these buttons are useless in the portrait mode.
The device runs on Android 2.1 Éclair with a little touch of Huawei customization. I was really satisfied with the well organized layout on home screen, which provides quick access to Web, Entertainment, etc.
Built in application are very minimum, only the basic required apps were preinstalled.
No official Froyo neither Gingerbread updates are announced for this device yet, and might be not in the future too. So if you want a proper tablet OS like Honeycomb, this device is definitely not for you.
Most of the stock Android features are intact along with no Flash support.
Accelerometer works fine, but it’s not that smooth comparing to other devices on the market. If you’re a gamer beware, you wont find much fun with this.
Although this carries a Li-Ion 2200 mAh battery, it didn’t lasted more than 3 hours on the (normal usage) test run. Another advantage is the provided USB port doesn’t charge the device, so you need to carry the charger with you all the time.
The device supports HSDPA up to 7.2 Mbps and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n.
I faced few practical issues while connecting to Wi-Fi (it didn’t detected them at first) and the connection terminated few time while I was playing with the device.
Huawei needs some extra miles to go before producing the perfect tab, till then be happy with what you got for the price so affordable.
Another important thing to mention is Huawei was able to pack a power processor along with other gizmos and still sell it all for a half the price of most Android based devices. Although the product have lot of concerns, we should agree Huawei has done something, that other manufactures should follow.
In a nutshell I’m not impressed about the device much, but still it’s a bargain device. To me it’s more like a giant phone rather than a Tab. 
