Decent screen, fast processor, practical keyboard, fair price
Feels a little unbalanced in keyboard dock, can't adjust angle of screen, no 4G
Spain's Energy Sistem brand has been making a few smartphone inroads here of late, but this is the company's first tablet that we've seen on these shores. It offers a distinctive, even quirky approach to the combination of tablet and keyboard but is it worth your cash?
It's on sale now for around £179.
Screen and chassis
Many firms have tried to address the laptop/tablet conundrum, and the Energy solution is a slim (9mm), lightweight tablet with an optional keyboard that attaches by magnetic clip. The two fold together so that it looks much more like a dinky laptop than, say, the Microsoft Surface which is fundamentally a tablet, with a soft screen cover that doubles as a keypad when you open it out.
The keyboard is a little smaller than full size but not so petite that it feels awkward to use, and they have managed to squeeze in six lines of tiles, including a selection of 'F' keys and a decent-sized mousepad. The keys are nicely responsive, with a decent amount of feedback, making it very easy to use.
Though the clip feels fairly robust, with the screen lifted up while it's in the keyboard dock, the balance feels a little off.
The tablet end is considerably heavier than the keyboard, and though it sits at a fixed angle of around 30 degrees, it's just a little too easy to tip over.
There's a slot for a SIM card so you can connect to your network without the need for tethering. But it's only 3G, so you'll miss out on fast 4G connectivity if it's available where you are.
The 8.9-inch screen offers a really rather good, better than full HD resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels. So you get plenty of detail and nice crisp edges when you're watching HD movies or viewing heavily detailed websites.
Software and processor
Under the hood there's a quad-core processor clocked at 1.83GHz and backed by a pretty decent 2GB RAM. It feels fast enough in general use, whizzing through the opening of apps with no obvious sign of slow-down, though it's not up there with the best.
There's a so-so 5-megapixel camera on the back plus a bog standard 2-megapixel snapper on the front for video calls. Picture quality on both is nothing to get excited about. And for storage there's a rather paltry 16GB of memory built in, though you can add another 64GB via microSD card.
The 6,000mAh battery proved to be actually rather good, and it easily gave us more than a full day of fairly heavy use.
Conclusion
For the price, this is a decent, compact Windows tablet with the added bonus of a Qwerty keyboard. The keyboard isn't quite full size, but it's big enough to use comfortably. The added bonus is that both the screen and processor are a little better than we'd expect for a device this price.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
