Ainol is a popular Chinese brand and these tablets are available in India. The tabs look much better that the other low cost tablets and are competitively priced. The Ainol Novo 7 Tornados 7 is a 7 inch touchscreen tablet that comes powered by a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB DDR3 RAM and with 8 GB of internal storage.
The Ainol Tornados 7 comes for a price of under Rs. 7,000. This is different from the other tabs like the Micromax Funbook, Xtab A10, D10s etc., which are powered by an Allwinner CPU. The CPU on the Novo 7 is Amlogic 8726-M3L Cortex – A9 clocked at 1 GHZ with Mali 400 GPU.
Performance wise the Allwinner CPU is still considered the best. But the Allwinner tabs that we get for the same price band comes with 512 MB RAM, whereas in this case it’s 1 GB. Let’s have a look at the tab.
Box Pack
As mentioned before this is a very good product, it looks great, the finishing is superb and the performance as good as the other tabs. The box pack itself gives you the sense of satisfaction, simple and eye caching. Check out the Unboxing video, after the article.
Inside the box : The tab, headphones, USB to Mini USB cable for charging / connecting with PC, User manual and warranty card. There is no power adapter (you may need to buy it or you can use the PC to charge the tab.
Design/ looks
The tab is available in Grey-Black and white colours. The touchscreen edges have got a silver lining and are separated by a front panel (like a photo frame). The curves are perfect, the glossy finish gives out an elegant look and if you look closely at the buttons, ports, they are all perfectly placed; this is the type of quality you usually find on a high end tablet.
What is missing on this tab?
There is no HDMI port, no power slot – you can charge only via the mini USB port.
Anything new?
Yes there is the Haptic feedback, a small vibration when you press certain on-screen buttons. There is also a dedicated home button next to volume and power button.
CPU, GPU and Memory
The Amlogic 8726-M3L Cortex-A9 1Ghz CPU with Mali 400 GPU does the work pretty well. Add to it the 1 GB RAM further speeds up the system. You can play games, surf websites, listen to music and even play HD videos without any lags.
Internal / External Storage
This tab come with 8 GB internal storage of which about 5 GB is available for the users. You can use the microSD slot for adding additional storage of up to 32 GB.
Display Screen
A 7 inch standard display with 800 x 480 pixels resolution (but benchmark apps shows as 800 x 444 pixels). Touchscreen is capacitive, smooth and responsive along with heptic feedback. The display quality is as good as you have seen on other low cost tabs.
Connectivity
There is Wi-Fi and external 3G dongle is supported using mini USB, you will need to confirm which dongle will work. There is also an option to use the Wi-Fi as a hotspot. It’s in settings -> more -> portable hotspot. That is all the option it has, there is no Bluetooth and GPS.
Additional features
G-sensors with high sensitivity for 3G gaming, front camera of 0.3 MP resolution for video chats using SKYPE, supports MOV, MP3, AVI, MPEG, MP4, FLV and many other formats and built in speaker / mic.
Battery
The battery is 3,700 mAh Li-Polymer. Battery takes about 3 plus hours to fully charge. The battery life seems really good. This tab can play approx 5+ hours (6 hours in my case) of movie on speaker with minimal brightness. Web surfing with Wi-Fi will be approx 5 hours. Battery like is very good. Doing some more test.
Performance
I used two benchmarking tools the Quadrant and the Antutu. The Quadrant app gave it a score which was as good as seen on allwinner tablets with 512 MB RAM. But the Antutu gave it a higher score which is Xtab A10 Allwinner (512 MB RAM) = 2892, Ainol Tornados 7 (1 GB DDR3 RAM) = 3361.
1080p Videos playback was smooth. The rendering was a bit slow as you try to zoom in when viewing a webpage or viewing images. I played the angry bird which came preinstalled, was smooth. The sound quality and output is good, you can hear the sound comfortably when playing games, music or watching movies. When using heavy apps like playing games the tab gets heated up, this is a common issue with almost all low cost tabs.
Games
Shadowgun game worked smoothly, downloaded the game using Wi-Fi, the tab heats up when you play this game.
Angry Birds RIO was smooth, no lag.
Price
This tablet is sold by VeeDee for Rs. 6,990. Buy online click here.
Specifications
CPU : 1 GHz Cortex A9 ARM AMlogic 8726-M3L
RAM: 1 GB DDR3
ROM: 1 GB
Touchscreen: 7 inch capacitive 5 point multi-touch with haptic feedback resolution 800 x 480.
Internal Storage: 8 GB, 5 GB usable.
Others: External 3G, Wi-Fi, USB, Gsensors, 3.5 mm jack, microSD.
OS: Android 4.0 (ICS)
Battery: 3700 mAh Li-po.
Ainol Novo 7 Tornados in hand and Unboxing video
Games you can play on Novo7