Review: Micromax Funbook

Review: Micromax Funbook:

 

These days one can find Android tablets in every nook and cranny. That, however, does not mean they are very good. This is clearly true at the high end of the market, the situation gets even worse at the low-end. These budget Android tablets are seldom usable, come with cheap hardware, poor quality software and most times are not even compliant with Google; hence they drop support for Google Mobile Suite (calendar, maps and Gmail) and the Play Store. Obviously, in India we have many examples of such low budget tablets. The Aakash is right up there, but competitors like LACs, iBall, Beetle and the Reliance tablet are also there, however none of them have the bells and whistles to dazzle the average consumer.
Clearly Micromax thinks differently. It hopes that its Funbook will provide a quality experience at a price point that will not hurt many and at the same time will provide content for students. The presence of the latest version of Android in its native state makes this device even more enticing, but the proof of the pudding will be in the tasting. For that read on.

Looks

Frankly, there is nothing new out here. With its 7-inch form factor, the Funbook has the same standardized tablet design highlighted with a glossy plastic front end and a brushed metal finished back. Having said that, rear part of the Funbook does not feel entirely metallic and perhaps could have the same plastic exoskeleton as the front but with brushed metal like paint. The sides of the Funbook have a very tasteful contour, which makes the device ergonomically sound and comfortable to hold for long durations. At 350 grams the Funbook is neither too heavy nor too fragile.
Weirdly though, the Funbook has been designed in such a way that landscape usage is encouraged. Looking at it from a landscape angle, the power button and the volume rockers are positioned in the top right hand corner and the rubberized Android buttons are placed on the right hand side of the display. This design decision makes a few usability tradeoffs. For instance, if a user opts to use the device in portrait mode, the power button automatically gets placed at the very awkward bottom right hand side area on top on which the volume rockers are placed equally weirdly. Besides this, the placement of the volume rockers is generally not very intuitive for the user either in portrait or landscape modes are it falls in no-man’s land with it being in a very odd top right hand side position in landscape view or at the bottom right hand side in portrait view.
Micromax has cleverly decided to add a VGA front facing camera rather than wasting its resources on a rear camera placed in such way that it works perfectly in landscape mode. The bottom end (in portrait mode) of the device is home to a myriad of ports such as mini-SD, HDMI adaptor (sold separately), memory card, 3.5mm and the charger. Basically, Micromax has packed in all the ports on one side of the device, which leaves two ends of the device, completely unused. On the backside, there is also a speaker grill coupled with the large Funbook branding.
Perhaps the biggest gripe I have with the device is the presence of cheap rubberized Android controls, which unfortunately remind of the shambolic LACs Paprika tablet. Considering, Google had done away with the need of hardware buttons on Honeycomb only, its not only weird to find these buttons out here, but also shocking considering these buttons add no value to either the design or usability of the device. Actually, these buttons lend the device an air of cheapness associated with ultra-low cost tablets, which is highly unfortunate as the product on the whole feels quite solid for the price.

Hardware

Powered by ARM Cortex A8 processor clocked at 1.2GHz with a Mali 400 GPU, the Funbook certainly is no technical slouch. Adding to its firepower, the device even has 512MB of RAM. When one couples this entire horsepower, it should be a given that the Funbook should have adequate power to do most daily chores.
The 7-inch capacitive display on the Funbook has a WVGA resolution (800×480 pixels). It is of the LCD variety, however I do wish that Micromax had increased the cost of the product and outfitted it with a better quality display. It is not that the resolution is too low, but the fact of the matter is the display is of a very poor quality. It has poor sunlight legibility and average indoor performance. It becomes particularly apparent if one reads a lot on the Funbook, which automatically gives the Funbook a minus as an E-Book reader or even as a web browsing apparatus.
Watching videos on the device is slightly better, but again the viewing angles were not very impressive, however I am less prickly about viewing angles as I prefer to watch my content straight from a 90 degree point of view rather than weird angles. Considering the Rs 6,499 price tag, this can be ignored.

Software

The most exciting feature of the Micromax Funbook is that it runs stock Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) out of the box. Micromax should be commended for bringing the new OS to the tablet and not customizing it, at the same time, top manufacturers like Samsung, HTC and Acer should be ashamed of themselves, as they are yet to offer a product in the tablet space that runs Ice Cream Sandwich. While, the Funbook runs stock ICS, I cannot confirm if the tablet would receive timely OS updates something that plagues most Android tablets.
The presence of Ice Cream Sandwich makes the Funbook a fun experience for the part. Navigating the UI for apps is particularly fluid, something I have been unaccustomed to on Android tablets which have been running Android Honeycomb. The optimizations Google has implemented on ICS indeed work. In fact, the full GPU acceleration on ICS does not only facilitate a more flamboyant UI but also a smoother one. At times in my testing the tablet would even out-perform dual-core Honeycomb tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 620, but at the end of the day the fallacies of the low-end hardware would become apparent. The device would work smoothly for the part, but it also tended to choke out of no where for no apparent reason.
Another area the ICS powered Funbook is superior to its Honeycomb and Gingerbread counterparts, is the way it multitasks. For the first time in the history of Android, quitting apps is easy. One just touches the multitasking button and then a list of apps appears that can be swiped away to oblivion. Part of the problem with Honeycomb was that there was no proper way of closing apps and people would often end up with 20 or 30 apps open, which would result in the device coming to a grinding halt. This problem is no where to be seen on the Funbook.
As far as typing was concerned the Funbook was generally adequate for typing and the virtual keyboard in ICS has been improved further from that of Honeycomb in terms of spell checking and prediction, however at times I found the experience to be slightly laggy. Web browsing is not the Funbook’s forte. It loads pages slowly, very slowly. In fact, our very own BGR India mobile page would take more than a minute open on a 4 Mbps Wi-Fi network, leave alone our full website. Besides this, the video playback was pretty stable at even 1080p resolutions and the same held true for causal games like Angry Birds Space and Cut the rope. For heavy-duty games like ShadowGun and Dead Space I would recommend getting a more powerful tablet.
Micromax has promoted this tablet as an instrument for education with the device having content from publishers like Pearson, Everonn, and Vriti. In addition to this, Micromax also preloads a Zenga TV app, which works smoothly and provides legal televised content. However, this is a paid service, for testing the device I used my personal account. To provide content more smoothly, Micromax has added its own apps market along with the Google Play store. Users can get movies like Dabangg, or apps like Times of India or even some educational content.

Performance

Without any doubt the Funbook is an impressive performer for general tasks. Navigation of the UI is fast and pretty fluid, apps start pretty swiftly and one can keep multiple apps and widgets opened together with feeling a lot of lag. The most surprising fact was that I was able to run live wallpapers and not suffer performance lags on a regular basis. This was indeed impressive. Obviously with innards like a 1.2GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and 4GB of memory this should be expected, however all is not perfect.
Web browsing is something that a device like the Funbook should excel at, but in fact it performs very poorly. Because of the poor display quality, reading is a painful experience even for person like me with good eyesight (Thank God!). Even the glorious Holo UI of Ice Cream Sandwich looks quite ugly in wake of the below par display.

On the whole if all you need is Gmail, minimal web browsing, casual gaming and bit of entertainment in the form of movies and music, the Funbook will perform perfectly. Problems will occur if web browsing and reading were the main task for the Funbook and anything graphically intensive, say, a game like Shadowgun would cripple the Funbook experience. In terms of battery life, the Funbook lasts a good five hours with consistent use of the web browser and a bit of gaming and multimedia entertainment.

Verdict

Considering the Funbook only costs Rs 6,499, it indeed is an impressive product. Funbook buyers can also get a Tata Photon+ under a promotional campaign, adding to its overall value for money. When it comes to competition in the sub-Rs 10,000 Android tablet market, the Funbook emerges as a clear winner. The cherry on the topping is Ice Cream Sandwich, which offers a wide variety of newly updated Google apps like Gmail and Google Maps, all in a package that even has a fluid and pretty UI.