Mercury mTab 7: Hands On Review

| Updated: Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 15:52 [IST]

In the past one year Kobian -- the computer peripheral manufacturer with the brand name Mercury -- is one such company which has come out as a prominent manufacturer, when it comes to tablet arena penetrating in the Indian market.

In the recent past, the company has launched several tablets including mTab, mTab 2, mTab Neo, mTab Neo 2, mTab Rio and the latest one mTab 7 - at affordable prices for the budget sensitive consumer market.

Out of all, one of the Mercury tablet offering which has scored a lot of attention, in terms of consumer curiosity and market sales is mTab 7. And fortunately, Gizbot got the opportunity to try hand on the newest tablet and test it's performance and competitive capabilities to stand against the rivals prevailing in the market including Micromax Funbook Pro, Wammy and Karbonn tablet and many more. Hence, today Gizbot has come up with the hands-on review on the latest offering -- Mercury - mTab 7.

Let's start the review of the tablet with a look at the benchmark scores:

Mtab 7 Benchmark Scores

AnTuTu Test Score - 2706

NenaMark 2 - 37.2 fps

Quadrant Score - 1648

Mercury mTab 7 Review Images

Key Specifications

Mercury mTab 7 was recently launched boasting 7-inch capacitive display flavored by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Priced at Rs 6,499, the device is based on a 1.2GHz single-core ARM Cortex A8 processor with GPU and VPU for graphics processing, has 512MB RAM along with 4GB internal storage and expandable up to 32 GB with a microSD card slot. Further, the tablet features 5 point touchscreen with 800 x 480 pixel resolution display, 4,000 mAh battery, providing battery backup of up to 5-6 hours on Wi-Fi and a 0.3MP megapixel front facing camera.

Inside the Box

When you buy a Mercury mTab7, you will get a power adapter, USB cable, earphones and a warranty card.

Form Factor

Taking it out of the box, the mTab 7 is pretty lightweight at 300 grams and is very comfortable to hold with its slim profile measuring 192 x 117 x 12 mm. The Mercury tablet has a white posterior with a black border along the display. However, the first feel that you get when you look at the tablet, it is that the screen could have been bigger, only if the black border was kept thin on the edges.

'Power' and 'home' physical buttons are placed on the top left corner. The tablet carries a dedicated volume control buttons, which ideally is good factor missing in most of the budget tablets.

Taking a look at the port and connectors, mTab 7 includes a 3.5 mm jack, HDMI port ( HDMI connector not included in the box) mini USB, microSD and charging socket. Adding to that the front facing camera is placed at the top left corner, which is an odd placing when compared to that of the other tablets.

The overall built feels sturdy and the finishing is pretty decent.

Interface and Processor Capabilities

When switched on, mTab 7 took some time to start, however, once switched on, it appeared smooth. The touchscreen was responsive and smooth too. Unfortunately, the resolution is quite low making it go along with the other budget offerings available in the market.

When it comes to the display, the screen is not capable of displaying bright colors and hence, the images appear washed out. Reason being, there is no ambient light sensor to adjust the brightness automatically.

I tried playing Angry Birds for 15 minutes, well, the game went pretty smooth, however, the tablet did start heating a little bit. Further, I downloaded Talking Tom from Google Play, well, this time; the app didn't work that swift. Most of the time, it was difficult for ‘Tom' to actually understand my words, causing frequent application hangs.

But it would not be wrong to admit that the tablet functions pretty good. Though it's not lightning fast, but it works fine. As mentioned earlier, gaming experience on the tablet was also fine. On the other end, coming to RAM, 350 MB of memory out of 512 MB is actually available.

Media

The stock music player supports only MP3 and a couple of other formats like WAV. Of course, users can expand this by installing a third party music player. The same goes for videos, too. 1080p MP4 videos play smoothly out-of-the-box without any stutter or lag. The company claims, that Mercury mTab 7 supports Adobe Flash 11.1 built-in speaker with full HD for the music enthusiasts.

However, the sound quality is just fair, as it may steer away many from using it to listen music. Yet, with headphones it works better. The volume level is also average.

The media player is there, which plays almost all popular file formats like flv, avi, mkv, RM, MP4 and more. You can watch movies from your pen drive as the tablet includes support for USB OTG. But do not plug in your portable hard drive, unless it's self powered.

Further, the tablet has a built-in 4GB of memory, however, only a small portion of it is available to the users. Anyways, it supports 32GB microSD card via its external card slot.

Connectivity

Well, it was time to test the tablet capabilities in terms of internet connectivity. After connecting the tablet to Wi-Fi, it was definitely found to be running smooth. Text rendering was good, Facebook also showed no hiccups while loading posts, overall the reception was commendable.

On the other hand, although there is no 3G support, but the tablet is equipped with the USB support 3G dongles.

Besides, all these factors, one major missing point in terms of connectivity was lack of Bluetooth. Consumers will have to use apps like DropBox for storing your files, documents, photos on the net and then synchronize them across your other devices such as PC or laptop.

Also, the tablet is packed with HDMI port, which will allow the consumers to connect the device to external high definition monitors and projectors in order to watch movies, photos or any multimedia content on larger displays. However, the cable is not included in the package and it has to be bought separately.

Meanwhile, other than the stock apps like Gmail, Gtalk, YouTube and Latitude, there are not many preloaded apps in mTab 7.

Browsing and Camera

mTab 7 comes with the stock Android browser which does a good job of surfing the web. Moreover, there is support for other browsers from Google Play to avail better browsing experience.

mTab 7 has a basic 0.3MP front camera and lacks a rear camera of better resolution. This is a major downside when compared to the other similar offerings that come with at least a 2MP primary camera in the same price range. Hence, don't think of using it for capturing pictures. Video chatting will work fine though, only if you find any supported apps.

Battery

The mTAB is fitted with a 4000mAh battery, which honestly offers a good battery backup. When checked upon it truly delivers 6-7 hours Web surfing time using Wi-Fi, more than it claims. If you use a 3G dongle, the Web surfing back-up will reduce, but still it's far better than other devices in this range. Also, the device does not heat that much. Even after watching a full movie, playing Angry Birds, listening to music, watching videos for around 4 hours along with two hours of Web surfing.

Verdict

For a price of Rs 6,499, Mercury mTab 7 is a big yes for starters. mTAB does fair well in the multimedia department, hence if you need a tablet for watching movies, surfing the web and playing games, then this is a good buy. We may have pointed out several negative aspects of mTab 7, but none of these will paralyze the experience of a first time tablet user. Always, remember, you wont get a replacement of an Apple iPad at this budget price. Hence, those looking for decent budget tablet purchase, Mercury mTab 7 is highly recommendable from our end.

Pros

* Good Capacitive touch Screen

* Fair performance in Web Browsing

* MP4 playback

* Presence of HDMI port

* In-built Adobe Flash 11.1

Cons

* Lack of rear camera, very low resolution front camera

* Bluetooth and GPS are not available.

* Average viewing angles