TechRadar Verdict
Pros
- +
Responsive
- +
Good browsing experience
- +
Battery is adequate
Cons
- -
No Home button
- -
Silver buttons are awful
- -
No Android Market
- -
Budget features
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The Advent Vega is the latest Android-clad touchscreen tablet to take on the Apple iPad.
The calibre of most, if not all Android tablets we're seen so far has left much to be desired. So the Advent Vega, with it's surprisingly cheap asking price of £249.99 doesn't really have much to live up to.
It launches alongside the even more affordable 7-inch Advent Amico, which is on sale with a resistive touchscreen for just £129.99.
A quick glance at the hardware specs and the Vega is off to a strong start.
It sports a 10.1-inch capacitive 1024 x 600 touchscreen, and it's powered by Nvidia's 1GHz Tegra 2 dual-core processor, so there's some significant grunt in this one. It's fairly thin, too, at 14mm and it's not too heavy either.
But the obvious problem the Advent Vega faces is that even though it comes loaded with up-to-date Android 2.2, it's far from being a fully featured Android device. Google has been open about the fact that 2.2 is simply not optimised for big-screen tablets the same way it is for smartphones.
What's more, Advent has hardly helped itself when designing this thing. There's no Home button to be found anywhere on the device, and there's no 3G connectivity either. Both of these things are required by Google before it will allow manufacturers to install Google services on a device.
The practical upshot of this is that the Advent Vega doesn't have access to the Android Market. Nor does it have access to Google apps such as Gmail, YouTube and the main Email app.
Can the Vega recover from this fairly mediocre start and win us over?
