Android-Running Chinese iPad Knock-Off Is A Piece Of Junk

Android-Running Chinese iPad Knock-Off Is A Piece Of Junk

Not that we ever expect elegant, fully-realized products from China’s plucky constabulary of Apple knock-off shops, but apparently, it takes a lot more to make an iPad killer than just aping the design and slapping Android on it.

Reviewed by Giz-China, the ePad seems to be an excellent example of what you get if you try to save yourself a couple of hundred bucks when you buy yourself a tablet.

It looks like an iPad superficially, but where the iPad has an aluminum unibody casing, the ePad has a cheap plastic back that’s easy to break. Unlike the iPad, though, at least the ePad has you covered with all your missing features, including a USB port, HDMI port, a microSD card reader and even a front-facing camera.

The display is where things really start falling apart, though. According to Giz-China, the ePad’s display looks “dull and washed out” and is “terrible” compared to the iPad.

As for performance, sure, the ePad boasts a 1GHz ARM A8 CPU… but apparently, even that isn’t enough to get this baby running right. The ePad is apparently plagued by choppy video and app launching so slow, the reviewer compares it to Commodore 64.

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Bizarrely, after that litany of complaints, Giz-China ultimately declared the ePad a better device than the iPad in their head-to-head faceoff… only to contradict themselves a sentence later. I’ll have a snootful of whatever you guys are having, it seems like a real loosener.

[via Gadget Lab]

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Hardware, iPad, News |

  • David

    Yep. I took a look at one of these pads too the other day at a local electronics store here in Beijing. Next to the iPad, the ePad is a POS. The people working were much more excited by the iPad under my arm, especially after they saw the difference in ease of use and the overall quality. Of course, the ePad is selling for about $150 so it is much more affordable. Though, the video was choppy, the touch unresponsive, the programs didn’t all run and extremely sluggish when they did.

  • rachel

    fuck you John Brownlee!! hahahahhaha