Review: Cube U27GTS 8" tablet
Final Score: ★★★☆ (2.90 out of 4)
Key Specifications:
- From: TinyDeal.com (search for ETC-358858)
- Price: $89.99 (Provided as a free sample for review)
- CPU: MTK8127 (1.3 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7)
- GPU: Mali-450 MP4 @ 600 MHz
- RAM: 1GB
- Storage: 8 GB
- Screen: 8" IPS, 1280 x 800 resolution
- Connectivity: WiFI, Bluetooth, GPS, HDMI
Pros:
- Good packaging and initial out-of-box impression
- Nice 8" IPS screen with good viewing angles and resolution
- Good value with GPS and HDMI included
- Decent build quality
- Nice stock Android experience
- Less awful camera
Cons:
- Slightly janky bluetooth connection issues (software problem)
- Slower boot time
- Some worthless pre-installed Chinese apps
- Marginally awful camera
Introduction
The Cube U27GTS 8" tablet is fairly unique at this price point. For less than $90 it offers a nice 8" IPS screen with narrow screen bezels that is approximately comparable to a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8". It also has a snappy MTK8217 quad-core processor that includes onboard GPS and HDMI output. TinyDeal.com was kind enough to send me one for a review. Could this possibly be a poor man's Samsung Galaxy Tab? That's what we're about to find out.
Out of the box, the Cube U27GTS presents the best out-of-the-box impression of all of my seven Chinese tablets. It starts with a non-generic box with a tastefully bland cardboard color and an ACube logo:
Here's the box tag, in case of minor future variations to the product:
Hardware Quality: ★★★☆
Design and Build Quality: ★★★☆
So, the packaging gives a premium feel to the Cube U27GTS purchase, but what about the actual tablet? I'm happy to say that the most important part, the tablet itself, doesn't fail to impress. Upon removal from the box, there is a noticeable effort to prevent scratches with removable plastic films on both sides.
The tablet has a plastic body, which is understandable given the price tag under $90. But the body has a clean, simple, attractive design with a black face and a white back side. The back side is glossy and unfortunately free of any sort of texture. I would prefer a golf ball styled dimple pattern to give it a bit of grip and make it more visually interesting. The U27GTS is pleasantly thin, and as mentioned has thinner bezels around the screen than usually found in a cheap Chinese tablet. The tablet is easy for me to hold in one of my fairly large hands, and it feel solid enough. There is a slight amount of creaking when applying moderate torsional pressure, but it's not a big deal. Both the front and rear cameras are strangely placed at slightly off center, which is annoying for marginally OCD people like myself, but at least they aren't located directly in the corner, which is positively impractical.
One distinguishing feature of the Cube U27GTS is the inclusion of a tiny charging LED light, which I am thrilled to see. The lack of an LED indicator is becoming more and more common even on extremely expensive premium Android devices these days, so it's encouraging to see a $90 Chinese device bucking the trend of this extreme cheapness. All of the controls and ports are placed along the top edge of the device, which is handy for charging the device in vertical mode. Incidentally, there is no dedicated charging port; instead the micro-USB port doubles for charging:
Battery Life: ★★★☆
The Cube U27GTS demonstrated pretty good battery life in my test methodology, both in terms of active usage and standby battery consumption:
- Screen on time: 6 hours, 46 minutes
- 480P video loop: 6 hours, 18 minutes
- Picture slideshow: 5 hours, 9 minutes
- Browser + WiFI: 6 hours, 25 minutes
- Standby battery consumption: negligible
The last bullet point about standby battery consumption is is important, given that other Chinese tablets I own tend to fall on their faces (screens?) when it comes to the battery slowly draining itself while in standby mode. The Cube U27GTS would be a good choice for a user like myself who only occasionally pulls out the tablet and doesn't want to pick it up with a dead battery because of standby battery drain. The battery is rated at 4900mAh according to the specifications, and I have no reason to dispute that.
Screen Quality: ★★★☆
One of the primary selling points of the Cube U27GTS is its nice 8" IPS screen. The superior IPS technology results in drastically improved viewing angles compared to the antiquated TFT display found on many other cheap Chinese tablets. There are several affordable Chinese tablets with 7" screens. But to the best of my knowledge the Cube U27GTS is one of the few tablets under $100 with at least 1GB of RAM and an 8" IPS screen. Here are some pictures of the good viewing angles:
Apart from the good viewing angles, colors look lush and accurate. Screen brightness is adequate on the highest setting, but I wish the lowest setting would go lower. There is no light sensor. Screen touch sensibility is good enough, although small user interface elements may require several tries to click. The 5-point multitouch works well.
WiFI Performance: ★★★☆
The Cube U27GTS has decent WiFI performance. It easily sustains my full upload and download bandwidth (which admittedly at 2 Mbps up / 0.6 Mbps down isn't much) on OpenSpeedTest.com. Connected to my NAS with ES File Explorer over my not very fast wireless LAN, it downloaded a 188 MB file at an average speed of 676 kBps, which is slightly less than my much more expensive laptop. In an area of my house where my laptop has a poor but stable signal, the U27GTS has trouble connecting and usually can not establish a connection. Overall, the WiFI doesn't give any serious problems, nor does it excel.
Speaker Performance: ★☆☆☆
The speakers are quite poor on this tablet. Sound is very tinny with poor bass tones, and overall volume is low. I ran an Audacity recording test, in which I recorded the first 25 seconds of a John Kilzer song with Audacity on my laptop, and then did a contrast test that measures the difference in decibels between the background noise and the foreground (tablet speaker) volume. It returned an unimpressive 33.1dB result. So with this tablet you'll want an external speaker. (Hint: Look here for some really nice little Bluetooth speakers for about $10.)
Camera Quality: ★★☆☆
You really shouldn't be using a tablet as a primary device for taking pictures, but if you do you'll find that the Cube U27GTS cameras are slightly better than the junk usually found in tablets at this price range. The rear camera is supposed to be 2.0 megapixels, which looks about right:
There is another 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera that should be good enough for video-conferences. Surprisingly, the U27GTS offers fairly advanced features in its default camera app that are not usually found in basic tablets of this price range, including: HDR mode, anti-flicker settings, zero shutter delay, face detection, smile shot, self timer, continuous shot mode, ISO settings, and face beauty mode. These features are essentially wasted given the fairly poor quality of the camera, but this is nevertheless a step above the competition.
Software Experience / Performance: ★★★☆
Perceived Speed: ★★★☆
One of the most important aspects of a nice tablet is the perceived speed. This is essentially a loose term for the overall impression of speed, or lack thereof, while using the tablet for daily tasks. Benchmarks don't tell the whole story; rather, snappy opening of apps and switching between them, fluid transitions, and smooth web browsing all translate into a general feel of speed. The HUU H1001T does pretty well in this criterion during normal usage. It doesn't leave me waiting on the applications, and it's enjoyable to use. As a matter of fact, it's notably snappier than a typical Samsung smartphone or tablet running Android, which are usually bogged down by bloatware and modifications to the operating system. The only apparent slowness is during boot time, which, at 52 seconds from the appearance of the bootsplash until arriving at the lockscreen, takes almost double the time required for most other tablets in this price range. Although the Mali-450 graphics processor will not be sufficient for extremely advanced video games, it is slightly better than the typical Mali-400 GPU found in most other cheap tablets. The CPU/GPU combination is enough for light gaming, and I have observed excellent performance with the X-Plane flight simulator, which has rather high quality scenery graphics.
Benchmarks: ★★☆☆
Benchmark results for the HUU H1001 under Antutu, GFXBench, and Vellamo are only marginal. But for a typical user that is not a heavy gamer, performance is more than adequate. In fact, the benchmark utilities generally rate the U27GTS as slightly faster than a Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, which used to be a pretty fast device back in its day. I'll upload some benchmark screenshots to my Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?...2s&usp=sharing
Stock OS Experience: ★★★☆
The Android experience is quite good overall with the Cube U27GTS. Out of the box, the interface comes in English, which is commendable. However, after doing a factory reset of the tablet, the interface reverts to Chinese. This is very confusing for most users who don't speak Chinese. Here is a helpful article that explains how to change the language from Chinese to something else.
The tablet comes with quite a bit of Chinese bloatware out of the box:
But fortunately the unwanted Chinese programs are all easily removable, unlike the bloatware shipped by most name-brand Android device manufacturers.
The OS is currently at KitKat 4.4.2, which is fairly current at the time of writing.
Unfortunately, the Android OS probably won't receive updates in the future, since manufacturers of cheap tablets tend to throw the device out to the market and forget about it.
As mentioned in the hardware review section, the camera software is quite advanced. The system also includes some advanced settings for audio profiles, the ability to show battery percentage on the top bar, and a good AOSP Android keyboard.
The Cube U27GTS unfortunately does not come rooted out of the box, or at least it doesn't ship with a Superuser app. However, it was pleasantly easy to root using Kingo. Basically, it only requires one click.
The U27GTS comes with the usual Google Apps, most importantly including the Play Store. However, I don't enable a Google account on my devices, which leads to greatly improved battery life. When I need to install an app from the Play Store, I use a site to download APK files directly from the Play Store.
A concern that frequently comes up relating to Chinese devices is the possibility of the device being shipped with spyware or other types of malware out of the box. I am happy to report that I scanned the Cube U27GTS with Malwarebytes and Lookout Security & Antivirus and both reported the device to be clean.
Here's the state of the built-in 8GB storage by default:
Value: ★★★☆
This review criterion attempts to balance the tablet's ranking in the previous review criteria with its overall ratio of features to price. The Cube U27GTS costs just south of $90, which is a pretty good bargain given the nice screen plus some additional features:
GPS: The MTK8127 SoC used in the U27GTS offers high value by including a GPS radio onboard. It gets a satellite lock fairly quickly given the lack of aGPS. This is a really nice feature to see on a tablet in this low price range.
HDMI: Another high-value feature included on the MTK8127 SoC is HDMI out. I don't own any devices to test it with, but it is reportedly capable of doing 1080p Full HD video playback and recording. This feature is surprisingly absent from many other tablets in this price range.
Bluetooth: The Cube U27GTS does have Bluetooth (the absolute cheapest Chinese tablets don't), which works, with some caveats. There appears to be a software bug that makes it try to always connect to the most recently used Bluetooth speaker, even if it is no longer available. Subsequently, it seems to be unable to locate or connect to any other bluetooth devices until after removing the bluetooth speaker it was trying to connect to. This bug only happens with bluetooth speakers (I tried two Chinese speakers and a Bose SoundLink), not with connected phone devices. So the workaround is to unpair bluetooth speakers after using them. This is a fairly major annoyance, and I wish a better solution was available.
Overall the Cube U27GTS is a rather high value tablet with lots of features at a very affordable pricetag, earning it 3 out of 4 stars for value in this category.
Conclusion
The weighted average for the Cube U27GTS 8" tablet computes to 2.90 out of 4 possible stars. So we'll round it up to 3 out of 4 stars overall. The Cube U27GTS is a pleasant tablet that impresses with a roomy 8" IPS screen and a nice design that looks and feels much more expensive than it is. The additional features such as GPS and HDMI are a welcome bonus, and performance is more than adequate for most tasks, making the Cube U27GTS the ideal alternative to the mainstream brands for budget-minded shoppers.
Many thanks to TinyDeal.com for sending this tablet for review. Please leave your comments below, and share this review on your favorite social media.