Torque Droidz View Review

 

Torque recently came out with a slew of Android tablets and handsets.  Among the new tablets launched by the local company is the Torque Droidz View, a 7-inch Android tablet priced at only P3,890.  This is a very attractive price and it competes directly with Cherry Mobile’s Cherry Pad tablet.  Read on to find out if the Droidz View is worth spending your money on.

Torque Droidz View Specifications

• 7-inch display with 2-point touch
• Non-capacitive
• 800 MHz CPU + 400MHz DSP
• Android 2.2 (Froyo)
• Wi-Fi
• Gravity Sensor
• 2GB internal storage
• Expandable up to 32GB via microSD
• VGA front camera
• Access to Android Market

Hardware and Design

For the price of P3899, don’t expect anything spectacular from the Droidz View in terms of hardware and design.

What you get from the box are the tablet, charger, headphones, and the adaptor for USB and LAN connection.

The Torque Droidz View is not thin by any means.  The tablet is quite thick at the back with a very noticeable bulge towards the middle.  It is also made of plastic, and even the bezel around the screen, although glossy, is undeniably plastic in construction.  The overall build doesn’t feel solid and you get the impression that the tablet will not be able to handle serious drops.

In terms of peripherals, the Droidz View has quite a lot to offer.  At the bottom you see the charging port, the headphones slot, the slot for the USB and LAN adaptor, and a microSD slot.  At the top is the power button and on the right side are the Menu button and the volume rocker.  On the front of the device you see only one physical button, which is the Home/Back button.

  

The screen of the Droidz View is resistive with a “2-point touch” feature.  It has a decent resolution and it looks quite sharp enough for the price.  The colors are decent enough, although they aren’t too vibrant.  The display has poor viewing angles, though, so expect to use this tablet at 90 degrees most of the time.

Performance

What defines the Torque Droidz View in terms of performance is the capacitive screen.  I can’t help but get frustrated at the tablet’s 7-inch resistive screen.  It’s simply not responsive enough and it takes a few swipes or taps at times before you get the response that you want.  And for a tablet, the responsiveness of the screen is crucial since it is the way you operate the device.  If this is not done right, the whole experience suffers, even if in terms of a actual processing performance the device is quite capable.

The Torque Droidz View’s 800MHz processor is actually quite nice.  It give’s you decent processing speed but it’s not reflected in the UI because of the resisitive screen’s non-responsiveness.  But when you play video or games, you feel the tablet’s power somehow and it’s really sad how the screen kills the experience.

What the tablet is good at is in multimedia playback.  It delivers good audio quality when you use headphones and it’s also good with playing videos.  But considering the screen’s poor viewing angles, you need to have the display at 90 degrees angle to get the best from the screen, otherwise, the colors will start to fade.

As to software, Droidz View runs Android 2.2 Froyo, a quite outdated OS by today’s standards but it’s still usable and easy to operate.  There’s no word from Torque if the OS will get an update in the future.  The UI on the tablet has a few enhancements like the side bar, or bottom bar depending on the tablet’s orientation.  This bar contains shortcuts to the most important apps and also the shortcut to the app drawer.  The Menu button on the side also brings up a Menu page with shortcuts to some pre-chosen apps.  Overall, the UI is quite intuitive, but again, this would have been good had it not been for the poor responsiveness of the touch screen.

 Wrap-Up

It is quite hard to judge the Torque Droidz View since for the price of P3,899, the tablet has quite a lot of features to offer.  But for a tablet, it’s very important that the screen is at least responsive since tapping and swiping are the only actions you basically do to operate the device.  On the Droidz View, the resistive screen is sadly quite frustrating to operate.  It’s not responsive and it simply kills the user experience.

The tablet is also poorly made, with the materials obviously made of cheap plastic.  This is quite understandable I guess considering the price of the Droidz View.  If there’s any redeeming quality the Droidz View has, it’s in playing multimedia.  The tablet delivers good sound and watching videos is actually a god experience on the Droidz View.

If you can get past the Droidz View’s non-responsive display, you may consider buying the tablet since it’s one of the cheapest tablets today.  If you have the extra thousands to spare, though, you might want to consider the Torque Droidz Flash instead, which already has a capacitive multi-touch screen and a 1.2GHz processor.  The Droidz Flash will at least give you the complete tablet experience.