ASUS MeMO Pad HD7 Review: $149 Nexus 7.1 Successor & Our First Look at MediaTek's MT8125
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 29, 2013 3:55 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Asus
- Mobile
- Android 4.2
- MeMO Pad
Final Words
We've already taken an early look at the new Nexus 7, also built by ASUS, and came away quite impressed. At $229 I don't think there's a better ultra portable tablet on the market today. With that established, how does the MeMO Pad HD7 hold up at $149? Pretty well I'd say.
The display is good given the price, as are the rest of the features. The MediaTek MT8125 SoC is a decent enough performer. Four Cortex A7s at 1.2GHz ends up being a good approximation of the four Cortex A9s in Tegra 3. The latter is quicker, but it's also more expensive.
The power consumption story is a different one. In light CPU or video playback workloads, the HD7 does worse than the original Nexus 7. You're still looking at around 8 hours on a single charge, but the higher end tablets are moving to 10 hours and beyond. It's unclear how much of this is software implementation vs. hardware, but by using the MT8125 you'd never guess it was a 28nm SoC with ARM's lowest power Cortex A7s inside. Obviously MediaTek's optimization target is cost, but power consumption is still important. I don't know that there's another alternative ASUS could've picked at this price point, so this is less a criticism of ASUS and more of MediaTek.
The MT8125's GPU performance is understandably not high-end, but it's still fast enough to play most modern Android games at high enough frame rates. The power efficiency story on the GPU side is much better as well. The HD7 easily outlasted the original Nexus 7 in our 3D battery life test.
The rest of the HD7's feature list is quite good. The 1280 x 800 IPS display is great for a value tablet, although it's obviously not going to be as good as what you get with the new Nexus 7. In terms of size, I personally prefer 8-inches if this is going to be my primary tablet. There's no denying the portability advantage of a 7-inch display though.
The addition of a microSD card slot will surely appeal to some customers. The integrated SK Hynix eNAND solution is an ok performer, but the HD7 will suffer the same fate as the old Nexus 7 over an extended period of usage until it gets Android 4.3.
The MeMO Pad HD7 is relatively quick, although no where near as fast as the new Nexus 7. UI animations are mostly smooth, but there are definite drops below 30 fps. The overall experience is similar to the original Nexus 7, just a tad slower.
Ultimately that's what ASUS has done with the HD7. It has given us a 1st gen Nexus 7 in almost every sense, with a $50 lower price tag. A pretty impressive accomplishment when you think about how big of a deal the Nexus 7 was when it arrived just over a year ago. Personally I'd rather have the new Nexus 7 at $229, but if you're on a very strict budget ASUS' MeMO Pad HD7 is a good option.
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matt32 - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
Can you guys run more kinds of WiFi tests on your review devices? Peak throughput is as useful as only showing sequential SSD writes/reads. Can you show how the throughput and latency changes over time especially when there's some sort of interference (ie. microwaves, other WiFi access points, cordless phones, etc.).All too often my Skype calls and Netflix videos get forced into a lower quality whenever my WiFi gets burps. Depending on the device (ie. single atenna vs 3 antennas), the frequency of my WiFi spazzing vairous. Of course, I get the least amount of issues when connected via Ethernet.
Alexvrb - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
Yeah I don't know what Google's problem is with SD slots. I'd take this thing over the Google-branded hardware.lightsout565 - Monday, July 29, 2013 - link
Very compelling but I'll wait till prices drop to $100. If someone could only make a decent $100 tablet, that'd almost be in "impulse buy" territory for me.Bob Todd - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
I think it's worth noting that the price, although higher than the gen one 16GB Nexus 7 has been since before the iPad mini launch, is actually _cheaper_ than that device when it launched a year ago at $250. Getting a 1200p panel that's also higher quality, a much faster SOC, double the RAM (@1600 vs 1333), much faster storage, and bunch of other little things (rear facing camera, wireless charging, etc.) for $20 less than the 16GB N7 debuted with just one year ago is pretty impressive to me.As for this thing, I actually wish the 8GB model was available here. This looks like the perfect replacement for an old Nook Color that's used to keep a toddler entertained with movies in the car. Especially if it can read SDXC (even if it's the gimped non UHS 1 speed that some devices not rated for SDXC can read them at).
Bob Todd - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
That should read..."noting that the price of the Nexus 7.2".Zibi - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
I've just bought one for my father. Pretty decent thing. Unfortunately it hasn't got USB with OTG. During the brief playing with the thing I did not found the option to create user accounts.SirCanealot - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
Sorry for the possibly silly question, but does anyone know what the cpu monitoring tool used in the screen shot in the battery test is? Looks awesome!skyline159 - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
It is System Monitorhttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com....
randomhkkid - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
Great article as expected Anand, what is the program you used to overlay the core usage/speed in game?Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, July 30, 2013 - link
So basically this is what we can expect to pick up for $99 during holidays sales.