iBall is the latest Indian player to jump on the tablet bandwagon. Reliance and Beetel both have their offerings out in the market and even as we figure out if a tablet is a utility or hype, here comes the iBall Slide. We spent a couple of hours with the iBall Slide and here is a quick run-down of the latest Android tablet in town.
iBall Slide Specifications:
- Android 2.3 Gingerbread
- 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 Processor
- 7″ WVGA Screen, Resolution: 840*480
- 8GB Internal Memory, MicroSD Expandable up to 32GB
- 2.0 MP Front Camera
- 2 MicroUSB Ports
- Battery 4400 mAh
First Look: iBall Slide
It’s certain that this tablet will fail to impress you with its first looks but when you ahead and hold the tablet it still won’t impress you either. The iBall Slide is a little too fat to our liking and judging by the industry standards, though, at the same time; it is much lighter as compared to the other tablets as well. The reason is that the Slide has a full plastic body which makes it look cheaper, as well. And if you look at the Infibeam Phi that we refused to review, you would know that the iBall Slide is probably an upgrade from the same OEM.
Infibeam Phi Video
The Slide has a 7″ WVGA full capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 800*480 pixels. From what we saw the screen felt a little dull and the sensors failed to adjust the backlight as per the lighting conditions. We also found the display to be lacking a bit in sharpness and vibrancy of its colors. The display failed to impress us even after playing an HD video on it. The touchscreen sensitivity on the device is at par with the best of the tabs in the market.
The controls on the iBall Slide are extremely strangely located on its side and appear highly similar to volume toggle buttons, and it’s certain that you will more often than not end up trying to control the volume with them and exit your audio / video player. It’s a bit irritating, will undoubtedly take some time getting used to. This is the same frustration we had with the Infibeam Phi.
The Slide has a front facing 2.0 MP camera and doesn’t have any on the back of the device. From the few images that we clicked from the device we weren’t immensely impressed with the quality. Though I must admit that the inept display also played some part in it.
Sound on iBall mobile devices is quite loud and decent enough, but alas it’s not the same with the Slide which I found to be quite low and would prove to be difficult to hear if you are outdoors. The Slide does not have stock Android UI. It has a slightly customized skin which is made to look like a cube interface when scrolling through screens.
It’s disappointing that the device neither has an inbuilt Wi-Fi or 3G which can be used only via a mini USB dongle. It also has a HDMI port along with a standard mini USB port and an OTG port which helps the connected devices to transfer data, as well. The battery on the device is 4400 mAH which, iBall claims would give you some impressive numbers including 6.5 hrs of music and 5hrs of video approx. though; we couldn’t verify their claims in the short duration we spent with the device.
All-in-all the iBall Slide is another low cost Android device and fails to deliver quality. Be it the built, usability or media features, the Slide failed to impress us. We would be ready to ignore the fact that this is a cheap Chinese product repacked / re branded as iBall Slide, but the lack of quality / performance hurts. We would recommend steering clear from this one, hunt for a used iPad 1st generation, take an Olive Pad running Froyo or a Galaxy Tab 7?, but not the iBall Slide.
