The advent of Ice Cream Sandwich (otherwise known as Android 4) has breathed new life into the budget tablet market. Devices that before might have felt unbearably sluggish to use, are now actually passable with the new OS on board, and the Disgo 9104 is among the first wave of devices to take advantage.
Its processing power comes from a 1.2GHz Boxchip processor, based on the ARM Cortex-A8 design. Graphics are provided by a Mali 400 GPU, and there's 1GB of RAM. That combination allows the tablet to hit a price well below £200, and yet it remains a usable device.
Android home screens flick by with surprising alacrity, as do menus and the app launch screen. Load up a web page and there is some sluggishness, exposed as a slight lag between moving your finger on the screen and the content catching up, but again this isn't a disaster. Furthermore, most of the games we tried to play ran fine: perhaps not with a completely 100% smooth frame rate, but playable nonetheless.
The design isn't bad either, given the low price. The matte silver chassis is 9.8mm thin, it tips the scales at 620g and connectivity is decent, with Mini-HDMI, 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD slot for memory expansion ranged along one of the short edges. You get 16GB of internal storage, although the rear 2-megapixel and front VGA cameras seem a bit of an afterthought. The battery was big enough to last 9hrs 50mins in our low-resolution video looping test.
But it's the 9.7in display that's the real star: Disgo claims it's the same panel as used in the iPad 2, which means it's IPS with a resolution of 1,024 x 768. When we measured it using a colorimeter we found it didn't quite match up, with a lower maximum brightness of 295cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 720:1. Subjectively, the colours don't look quite as vibrant either, but it's a great display for a tablet this cheap.
All this indicates a clear progression from the hideous nastiness of many previous budget Android tablets, but as we began to use the Disgo 9104 in anger, more serious issues cropped up with increasing regularity. Our biggest bugbear was keyboard lag, which has such a deleterious effect on typing that we'd hesitate to recommend using this tablet to work on anything longer than a short email. Even replacing the stock keyboard with third-party keyboard Swiftkey failed to alleviate the issue.
Another problem is that, out of the box, the 9104 is missing the core Google Apps. There's no Gmail, no Maps and, critically, no Play Store. Instead, Disgo has provided links to a number of popular apps on its website, and supplies the third-party app store SlideMe for adding more. Neither is any substitute for the real thing, though, so it's just as well it's possible, with a little effort, to find the installer on the web and add the Play Store yourself.
But before you get that far, it might pay to wait a little and see what effect the newly announced Google Nexus 7 tablet has on the budget market. It costs even less than this at £159, but has a far more powerful processor, a higher resolution screen, full access to the Play Store and the complete set of core Google Apps pre-installed. It's likely that Disgo and companies offering similar products will have to reduce their prices accordingly.
The Disgo 9104 has its plus points - a good screen, 16GB of internal storage and Android 4 - but the arrival of the Nexus 7 and a host of rough edges will most likely put paid to this otherwise promising tablet's chances.
Source: Disgo 9104 review, specs and price | Tablets | Reviews | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/tablets/375595/disgo-9104#ixzz1zTJ6H8m2
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