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Much of the MyTablet's charm comes from its appearance, but if you peel away the curtain you'll have a genuine Wizard of Oz moment.
It tows the party line of cheap Android tablets in the sense that it offers plenty of connectivity and it is, well, cheap, but it falls flat on many, many, other levels in execution.
We liked
It is wonderfully designed. It's pleasing to look at and feels comfortable in your hand, if not a bit heavy. Argos clearly spent the bucks on the design team, possibly because teenage focus groups told them aesthetics trumps substance.
The amount of connections available is impressive. You can also transfer anything you download onto an SD card and port it to other devices.
It's cheap. Quite frankly, this is a Christmas stocking gift that will become completely irrelevant come January 2014. Argos knows this and that's why it's £99.99.
We disliked
Where to start? The screen is poor for today's standards. 1200 x 600 is not going to suffice if you want to enjoy any type of decent gaming or movie watching and the colours look very washed out. It's also not very responsive and this is never more obvious than when running a burdensome game.
It's slow and struggles with multitasking. The 1GB of RAM isn't enough for today's average tablet user. Running multiple apps will cause it to slow down and, at worst, restart entirely.
There's also a silly amount of bloatware pre-installed. It's baffling as to why Argos boasts about the 19 pre-installed apps that can't be deleted and it's hard to see why anyone would be in favour of this. The pre-installed apps are apps that can easily be downloaded manually, so it's clear that they are marketing deals that have been struck up between Argos and the various vendors.
Verdict
This is bargain basement electronics. It's cheap, solid and probably a good gift for a kid - given that they'll either lose interest after a week or break it.
Argos makes no bones about releasing this for the Christmas market and there is something very throwaway about the tablet that seems to fit perfectly with the Christmas ethos. Visually, it's impressive and it's solidly built.
There's also a whole host of external ports and connections that is desperately missing from many better, higher-end, tablets like the iPad mini or Nexus 7.
But that's where the positives stop. The screen, lag, poor multi-tasking, unresponsive touch and washed out colours make using this a bit of a chore and probably not worth spending £99.99.
Argos also missed a trick by not introducing its own movies and games store, it seems like that could have been its saving grace if it had used the might of its buying power to offer cheap content to go along with the cheap tablet.
Especially since there's an Argos app, why aren't the films and games available to download? If you can, we urge you to fork out an extra £20 and buy Tesco's Hudl.
