Qooq tablet review

As a kitchen aid, the Qooq is a well-thought out piece of kit, then. Even its rather clunky-looking Linux-based interface is well-tuned and reasonably light on its feet, and offers useful additional tools such as a kitchen timer that sits in a pull-out side bar, a meal planner and shopping-list builder.

However, cooking is the limit of the Qooq’s usefulness. It does have an email app, internet radio and video and MP3 players, but these are all basic and there’s no way of adding more. There’s a web browser as well, which supports Flash and scores a mediocre 1,958ms in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, but you’ll soon tire of its slow-motion scrolling and lack of multitouch zoom support.

Even if you could load games and other apps on this tablet, the chunky, flexy plastic chassis encasing will put you off whipping it out in public. No matter how rugged Qooq insists it is, the shiny red plastic will always feel cheap, and the poor quality of the 10.1in, 1,024 x 600 resolution TN screen compounds this impression.

Viewing angles are such that the colours shift significantly when you move away from viewing straight on, and the maximum brightness is only 169cd/m2 with a woeful 245:1 contrast ratio. Battery life is appalling as well: in our looping video test, it lasted a mere 3hrs 13mins with Wi-Fi off and with the screen set to half brightness; in the kitchen we had to leave it plugged in.

The biggest issue with the Qooq, however, is the price. At £289 inc VAT, it’s nearly as expensive as a proper 10in Android tablet such as the Nexus 10, and pricier than compact tablets too. This is something that one might be able to explain away had it included an ongoing subscription to new recipes via the internet. However, Qooq expects its customers to pay for that privilege via a £9.90 per month, Spotify-style subscription. It is possible to save money by paying for a whole year up front, but that only serves to highlight what poor value the whole package is: paying £99 for extra recipes seems like throwing good money after bad.

That, in combination with the rest of its shortcomings – the cheap build quality, the terrible display, the awful battery life and the high purchase price – means the Qooq tablet isn’t something we can recommend to anyone other than the most gadget-obsessed cooking fanatic. It’s a shame, since we very much like the idea of a sensibly designed, robust kitchen tablet.