Review of iconBIT PARUS 8Gb: Movies for less money

Recently we got a new tablet PC from famous American company iconBIT. Not only that the company itself and products manufactured under the brand iconBIT cause close interest, the appearance of new tablets of this company could not fail to arouse our interest.

The fact is that, on the one hand, perhaps the most famous area of iconBIT’s business is video processing, and above all its excellent media centers. But the tablet line under the brand iconBIT develops very successfully and we are pleased to have the opportunity to “feel in hands” a new promising model called iconBIT PARUS.

Specifications

Screen: 4:3 TFT capacitive screen with resolution of 1024×768 pixels and multitouch,

Processor: ARM Cortex A9 1GHz,

OS: Android 4, more than 100000 apps available online,

Camera: 2MP rear camera, 0 front camera.3MPix for photo/video and web applications,

RAM: DDR3 1024MB,

ROM: 8GB internal memory, expandable micro-SD or micro-SDHC memory cards up to 32GB,

Internet: Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n,

Video: Support 1080P decoding H.264, MKV, AVI, RM, WMV, MPEG4, VOB, RMVB, DAT, FLV, 3GP, MOV. Supports YouTube, HTML5 and Flash10.3,

Audio: MP1, MP2, MP3, WMA, WAV, AC3, AAC, OGG, APE, FLAC, 3GPP, MPEG, AMR,

Photo: JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, JPEG,

TXT, LRC, PDF, HTML, HTM, EPUB, PDB, FB2,

Playback Time: Up to 5 hours of video playback, up to 20 hours of music playback, up to 7 hours of web surfing,

Battery capacity: 4000 mAh,

Size: 205 x 155 x 11.8 mm,

Weight: 450g.

Additional Features: A-GPS, G-sensor, Multi-language support, OTG, Record function, Stereo

The undoubted advantage of the new tablet is its apparent “omnivorousness” in terms of supported “out of the box” video formats, as well as a very attractive weight for a fairly large battery. But first things first.

Appearance

The tablet from iconBIT has a very classic design type of “rectangle with rounded corners” for which Apple was about to start charging all Tablet makers on Earth .

The back wall of the tablet has a soft touch coating, which is quite tight and fits nicely in your hand.

The front panel has a plastic cover. It is thanks to this factor that the company’s developers managed to make the iconBIT PARUS so nicely lightweight without affecting its computing power and battery life.

The fact that many modern models of tablets and smartphones have a front panel of tempered safety glass, which is designed to save the matrix from shocks and strong pressure. In this tablet, as already mentioned, the front panel is plastic, which led to both reduce the weight of the device and its cost.

The decision may seem very controversial: Is it worth the risk of the integrity of the device? On the other hand, we feel the weight of the mobile computer every day, while it is shocked only rarely I want to believe it .

In addition, people who often use tablets and have had the misfortune to damage them, will confirm that protection in the form of a glass panel is often not as effective as it is touted, and subsequent repair – on the contrary, it is very expensive.

Traditionally, all controls are placed on the sides of the tablet. If you take the iconBIT PARUS vertically with the camera upwards, then on the top right side you will find the power button, as it is the case with almost all Android smartphones.

On the right – the traditional “volume rocker” volume control, the left side is empty. All connectors are concentrated at the bottom. On the one hand, this may be correct for example allow you to connect the tablet to the cradle, if you think about doing that , but the placement of headphones jack – not very convenient, as we think the traditional placement of mini-Jack and power button next to more convenient.

Hardware platform

The “heart” of the tablet is a system-on-a-chip SoC Amlogic AML8726-M3, integrating on a single chip central single-core processor ARM Cortex-A9 1GHz, a graphics processor Mali-400MP and fast memory controller standard DDR3.

The choice of this powerful and inexpensive chip has allowed the company, remaining in the niche of inexpensive tablets, to create a fairly productive unit, which can easily handle, including, with a fairly “heavy” video content.

As for available memory, it’s 1 Gb of RAM as mentioned above of DDR3 standard , 8 Gb of flash memory and the ability to use removable memory cards micro-SDHC format up to 32GB inclusive.

In principle, the tablet can be connected and any USB-drive with the same restriction on capacity : the body has a connector micro-USB, and in the tablet – the adapter “USB – micro-USB”. The same connector is used for communication with the computer.

Since we are talking about communication, the tablet has a mini-HDMI for connecting your TV or monitor. Also features 802.7 Wi-Fi-enabled 802.0 wireless interface.11b/g/n.

And here is no Bluetooth, on the one hand maybe it is right: the tablet has no telephone module, and therefore does not need a Bluetooth-headset, on the other – wireless headphones for listening to music thing handy.

However, the Bluetooth module for models of this class is really not the thing of prime necessity.

Multimedia capabilities

Actually, this part of our review is probably the most interesting for most readers: it is not a secret that tablets are mostly used for watching videos, surfing the internet and reading e-books/magazines, and of course for playing games.

In order for the tablet to cope with its multimedia duties it needs to have a powerful processor, a clear and bright screen, as well as a set of software and preferably hardware for the successful playback of the required content.

Since the company iconBIT a lot of effort and time to develop their famous media centers, it has a solid experience in the development of playback devices, which “can” almost any video and audio files.

Practice shows that the specialists of iconBIT know their job “perfectly well”: files of any formats are played by the built-in player easily and naturally, giving the screen a very clear and clean picture in resolution up to Full HD. Of course, you can not fully achieve the clarity of Full HD: the physical resolution of the matrix does not allow 1024×768 , but the video looks on the tablet screen very nice.

The tablet has HDMI output, so you can connect it to your TV and watch full HD video in full quality!

Do not forget that working with multimedia means not only playing third-party video content, but also creating your own. To do this, the hero of our review is equipped with as much as two cameras: the front – 0.3 Mpix and rear – 2 Mpix.

There is not much to say about the front: it’s just a regular camera with a low resolution, designed for video calls. It’s up to the job, and that’s good enough for her.

Rear camera is necessary for WEB conferences with more than one participant. You can use it for taking photos and videos just like a camera in a budget smartphone.

Software

One of the main “chips” tablet iconBIT PARUS is, of course, the new version of the operating system Google Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. To date, a newer version of Android is equipped only with Google’s own tablet Nexus 7.

The operating system is the most “vanilla”, that is standard. This means a lack of improvement on the part of the tablet manufacturer, but these improvements are sometimes not to the taste of all users.

Best of all, it comes with a full suite of Google Apps, including the Google Play Store, giving you access to a whopping 550,000 apps – no less, no less.

The new operating system from Google provides a very nice and user-friendly interface, but at the same time imposes higher demands on the hardware.

This can probably explain some of the “thoughtfulness” of the interface. This is especially noticeable when playing games, when all the hardware is busy serving the program, and the user needs high responsiveness of the interface.

Another thing that makes me tense and even annoyed by the sluggishness of the response is the fact that the response to the power button is not instantaneous enough. On the one hand the button is quite narrow and has a small stroke, so when you press it with the pad of your finger you can’t always tell clearly whether you pressed it or not.

On the other hand, it wakes up the computer for about a second and a half, during this time the tablet does not show any vital signs neither on the screen nor on any other indicators.

Testing

And now some dry numbers. Several sets of test programs were used to test the tablet. The first one is AnTuTu Benchmark.

This package measures the overall performance of your device on the Andriod platform, presents it as a summary rating and allows you to compare your device with a set of devices previously tested by the community of users of this wonderful program.

Measurements show that iconBIT with its rating of 2530 is not the world’s performance champion Asus Prime and HTC One X with rating of 10 000 . First of all, the speed of reading/writing to flash memory and the speed of drawing 2D graphics rocked. But otherwise, the speed of the iconBIT Parus is quite good, especially for such a budget price.

Another useful program from AnTuTu – Battery Test. It didn’t want to be installed from Google Play, though, complaining about its incompatibility with the iconBIT Parus. But when we had to download it from the developer’s site and force a file manager to install it, this “sickness” disappeared without a trace and the program started working perfectly.

As a result of measurements, the tablet showed a rating of 734 “parrots. It took about 3 hours for the test program to completely drain the battery. Not bad at all.

The program Multitouch Tester verified the ability of the tablet’s sensor to recognize five touches simultaneously. And there’s not much to decipher here: the company announced a multi-touch tablet with 5 touch. The program confirmed it this way: I touch one finger, the program draws one circle, I touch two – two, and so on to six. The sixth touch multitouch can no longer work. And five – everything is clear.

It goes without saying that we backed up the results of synthetic tests by testing the tablet’s power system while watching a video. For testing, we took a video file in MKV format with 1280×720 resolution, encoded with the AVC codec, with a full battery charge iconBIT Parus was able to play it for 4 h 46 min.

Another program – the Display Tester – simply displays the graphics capabilities of the tablet.

On the screenshot it is clearly seen that the general information about the device displayed by the software: resolution, size, density in dpi etc. corresponds to the parameters declared by the manufacturer.

Conclusions

Like its predecessors, iconBIT Pride and iconBIT Matrix, the new tablet iconBIT Parus is perfectly adapted for high definition video. And both on their own screen, and with the output to the TV screen – thanks to the mini-HDMI connector.

The tablet has a good battery life when using it for Internet surfing or watching videos.

At the same time, the computing capacities of iconBIT Parus for “heavy” computer games and other tasks, that are very CPU and memory intensive, are on the level of solid average. Which, however, once again confirms its functional and market positioning.

NetTAB PARUS normally supports all of the most popular games on Google Play, especially the free ones – everything goes without any lags.

“Lags” or compatibility problems can be in games, developed for Tegra 2/3 with the appropriate graphics, but such tablets are 3 times more expensive than PARUS and more expensive than many modern laptops, hence their speed with 3D games.

NetTAB PARUS tablet is not for inveterate gamers, but for ordinary people, for those who like to watch movies, read books, check email, sit on social networks, play “Angry Birds” or similar graphics games.

To summarize our review, we can say that if the tablet is chosen for watching videos, reading books and simple games, the iconBIT Parus – a great option with excellent consumer qualities and reasonable price.