For a price, there’s zero indeed terrible about a SMiT MID-560A touchscreen tablet. If you’ve never held an Android device, you competence even be pleasantly surprised with the functionality upon suggest. But if you have — or if you paid for yours from a association called Enso and became inextricable in a vaporware scandal as a outcome — a zenPad is quite a letdown. Hear because after the mangle. Enso zenPad unboxing

Disappointment series one: a MID-560A runs Android 1.5. Yes, you read which right — though Enso advertised a device as an Android 1.6 inscription and serve claimed a appurtenance would be upgraded to Eclair as a little small apology for a multi-month delay, our review section greeted us with a stock Cupcake launcher as well as pestilent black Android Market pages. That’s not a usually fabrication, possibly — a section has no digital compass as betrothed (though ours did come with GPS) as well as fails to natively support any of the video formats mentioned upon Enso’s spec sheet. Even the picture upon Enso’s homepage is something of the lie, as whilst a device there shows the far-reaching widen of beautiful sky in which to place applications, a actual five-inch space here only allows for the familiar 4 x 4 idol blueprint.

Though a out-of-box knowledge wasn’t what you expected, a tablet itself isn’t hideous — it’s simply the slow, plodding Android device (slower than our T-Mobile G1, if you’ll believe which with the subpar resistive touchscreen as well as more than the couple of annoying design flaws. While the 800 x 480 shade is bright as well as transparent sufficient for comfortable reading, you’re not starting to wish to write anything; regulating the enclosed stylus to hunt as well as pat, the digitizer often registered multiple keypresses when we longed for just a single, and you quickly learned there was no indicate in perplexing thumbs. The soft-touch rubber casing felt solid sufficient, but a Power, Home, Menu and Back buttons aren’t laid out in logical places for possibly straight or horizontal grip; you mostly incited a device off when we’d simply dictated to try an additional app. Since there’s no accelerometer, you have to reason the Menu symbol to switch a zenPad into portrait mode, but the program has portrait and landscape modes churned up, meaning which apps written to work in usually one orientation (like YouTube) play a wrong citation, as a little rope of tone opposite a tallness, rather than than breadth of a screen. 3D apps, multitasking and certain videos should be avoided, as the unit mostly crashed when you do such. And given we’re on a hurl here, we’ll also supplement that a hardware didn’t regularly commend trustworthy USB cables and microSD cards but a reboot. On a single arise a device got all Hypno-Toad on us, flashing epilepsy-invoking white patterns opposite a entirety of the LCD. No fun.

To be completely fair, a web browsing knowledge was essentially pretty snappy, audio quality was fairly clear, a battery lasted multiform hours at maximum lightness, as well as the GPS fast bound upon our place with no prodding required. None of that makes up for the web of damaged promises which got us here, however, and even in a sub-$200 price operation there are distant better Android tablets upon suggest. By the approach, we did get in hold with CEO Alberto Armandi one last time for all you existent zenPad buyers. He says a company’s almost ready to ship… you’ll just have to wait for an additional ten days.

Promise.