Asus Memo Pad 10 review

The Asus Memo Pad 10 joins devices such as the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 and HP Slate HD 10 HD among the burgeoning ranks of budget 10in Android tablets. However, despite being priced at only £180, the Memo Pad 10 finds itself struggling to really stand out from its budget contemporaries. See also the 11 best tablets of 2014

One area where the Memo Pad does manage to outdo its rivals is in performance. Inside is a quad-core 1.6GHz Rockchip RK3188 CPU and 1GB of RAM which, although a modest partnership, are good enough to turn in some decent benchmark scores. The Asus completed the SunSpider JavaScript test in 1,178ms, placing it just ahead of the Yoga Tablet 10’s time of 1,333ms and the Slate 10’s 1,229ms. The Memo Pad also acquitted itself well in the Peacekeeper browser test, managing a result of 790 to the Slate 10’s mediocre 463.

It’s still no performance heavyweight by modern standards, and we found the Memo Pad far less snappy and responsive than premium devices such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX 8.9in, but it’s serviceable for a budget model. There are occasional judders and hitches while navigating Android 4.2, but by far our biggest bugbear is the onscreen keyboard which exhibits frustrating amounts of lag.

The Memo Pad’s gaming capabilities are modest. In the GFXBench T-Rex benchmark the tablet achieved an average of 5.5fps, again narrowly ahead of the Yoga Tablet 10’s score of 4.8fps and the Slate 10’s score of 5.3fps. The Asus’ ARM Mali-400 GPU is no powerhouse, but it’s able to run Asphalt 8: Airborne smoothly at Medium detail settings, and there’s more than enough power for all but the most demanding Android titles.

Battery life is acceptable, but here the Memo Pad failed to outdo its rivals. With the screen calibrated to a brightness of 120cd/m², the Asus’ 19Wh lithium polymer battery lasted 9hrs 46mins in our looping video test. By contrast, the Yoga Tablet 10’s huge 9,000mAh battery helped it to last a herculean 15hrs 25mins in the same test.

At first glance, the Asus’ screen is underwhelming. Just like its budget peers, the MeMO Pad 10’s 1,280 x 800 display delivers pixellated text and images, and the LED backlight also disappoints, with maximum brightness topping out at a relatively dim 288cd/m². That’s substantially less bright than the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10, which peaked at an impressive 495cd/m2. Anything lower than 300cd/m² is too dim to use outside on a bright day, and will tend to look washed out under harsh lighting, so this is a disappointing result for the Asus.

Image quality is actually pretty good, however. Thanks to the contrast ratio of 933:1, colours have plenty of punch, and the Asus dredges up detail from the darkest to the lightest tones. There’s no noticeable colour cast, and our test images looked rich and natural, with lifelike skin tones and realistic hues.

Physically, it’s not the most handsome tablet we’ve seen. Although it’s fairly light at 522g and slim at 10.5mm thick, the glossy white back panel looks cheap and is slippery in the hands. The build quality is plasticky, too, and there’s noticeable flex in the tablet’s chassis.

The Memo Pad 10’s specifications offer up little in the way of surprises. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, a micro-USB port and a microSD slot that supports up to 64GB of extra storage. There’s also single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3. The Asus’ SonicMaster speakers can be found near the edges of the back panel and, although they’re capable of a loud maximum volume, sound quality is tinny and their placement makes it easy to block them with your hands while using the tablet in landscape mode.

Verdict

While the Asus Memo Pad HD10’s performance puts it just ahead of its rivals, it doesn’t do quite enough to distinguish itself. For this kind of money, we’d plump for a higher-quality 7in tablet, such as Google’s Nexus 7, which offers significantly higher quality than the MeMO Pad for only £20 more. Even if you’re dead set on a budget 10in tablet, then we’d still recommend you buy the £200 Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 instead, which offers similar performance, a brighter screen, better build quality and a nifty Bluetooth keyboard.

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