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.
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]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
