Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Jumped on the $40 Black Friday deal thinking I couldn't go wrong - but I did. Here's the rundown: The physical unit is decent. It doesn't feel cheap and has a respectful "heft" to it. The back seems to be a sturdy plastic with a nice grain to it which makes it easy to hold without slipping. The screen is not as bad as I was expecting. It's bright enough for indoor use. The controls and connectors are all on the same short side. This does make using the controls a bit awkward if you have the device plugged in. The battery life is not great but within my expectations for the price I paid. From a full charge with moderate use (just browsing, playing with settings, etc - no youtube or auto/video playing) I got about 1.5 hours. It took about 2 hours to charge back to full with the supplied AC adapter and charging cable. I did experiment with Youtube and it played videos ok. It would hang for a while as it cached enough for smooth playback but I didn't notice any problems once the videos started. Audio is what you would expect on an inexpensive unit - tinny and not very loud. You would definitely need headphones (there is a jack for one) if you wanted to hear audio in any but the quietest of places. From here it goes downhill. The screen has a noticeable flicker when connected to AC power. The touch portion of the screen is unresponsive and frequently inaccurate. About one in 5 touches registers significantly off from where I actually touched. The machine is crazy slow. For $40 I was expecting slow, but this is nearly unusable in my opinion. You tap something and then have to wait and pray it registers. If you get impatient and tap again it will queue up the taps and you can end up in lots of interesting areas. The description said Amazon's app store was preinstalled which I took to mean in addition to Google Play - this is not the case. Google's app store is *not* loaded and there is not a straight forward way to get it on there. So much for all of the apps I had planned to use which are not in Amazon's store. Finally, the description claims this thing has 4G of flash memory but I think that is an error. As near as I can tell there is only 1GB of memory in this thing. I'm not an expert navigating around a vanilla Android 4.2 system so I could be wrong on this. The bottom line is this device is (in my opinion) not worth it even as a starter, occasional use tablet. I think 90%+ of the people out there will be frustrated with the severe lack of performance. Personally, I'm returning this thing.