Asus Memo Pad 7 – Design
The Asus Memo Pad 7 looks a whole lot like last year’s Asus Memo Pad HD 7. This new model sounds like a downgrade, but the two tablets are extremely similar in several ways – including price. Both sell for around £129.
Asus has managed to trim down the screen surround a bit, but the look of the Asus Memo Pad 7 isn’t going to make any jaws drop with its design. It’s not meant to, though.
This is a simple, plastic tablet with a nice and curvy soft touch rear. The soft-touch feel is a good deal nicer on the fingers than the glossy plastic used in many other budget tablets we’ve tried in recent years.
At 295g, the Asus Memo Pad 7 weighs about the same as the 2013 version of the Nexus 7. It’s easily light enough for an adult to hold in one hand when, for example watching a video while standing up on the train.
That light weight should also come in handy if you want to find a tablet for a child – not to mention the forgiving plastic design and low price.
Build quality is good too. There’s no worrying creaks and while the top layer of the screen does not appear to be Gorilla Glass 3, it is glass and it is toughened. You need to put a fair bit of pressure on the screen for it to distort, and it only occurs at the point you’re pressing. With lower-quality tablets, pressing on one part of the screen can distort another – a sure sign that the thing has been constructed with all the care of a whistling market stall trader.
The version of the Asus Memo Pad 7 we’re testing has 16GB of internal memory, and there’s an exposed microSD slot on the left edge to let you get some more space for films and music. Things like this graceless socket and the pretty tactless positioning of the charge and headphone sockets are signs that this tablet has no style pretensions. If you want a tablet to show off to people, this probably isn’t it.
image: http://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/54/2014/07/asus-memo-pad-7-1.jpg
Asus Memo Pad 7 – Screen
One place where the total lack of flashiness does bother us is the screen. It seems to use a very similar panel to last year’s Asus Memo Pad HD 7.
image: http://ksassets.timeincuk.net/wp/uploads/sites/54/2014/07/memo-pad-7-2-1.jpg
When you can get the 1080p Nexus 7 for just £20 more than the Asus Memo Pad 7 if you shop around, it’s disappointing that Asus hasn’t made the step up.
The lower resolution makes text and images look a good deal softer, and if you get your eyes at all close to the screen you can see the pixel structure.
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