Smartlink Digitab SS1078W Review: A Story of Compromises

Smartlink might not be a well-known brand in the tablet market, but the company has been around for quite a long time. Formerly the Indian avatar of D-Link, Smartlink became an independent company in 2008 and has since then dealt in products ranging from networking infrastructure to motherboards, with multiple brands including Digilink (now sold to Schneider Electric), Digisol, Digicare, and Digilite.

Now, it has also branched out into the consumer tablet market with a range called - what else - Digitab. Three products have been launched, with features and specifications tailored for the Indian market. Two of these are 7-inch tablets, while the most expensive one has a 10.1-inch screen.

We have the unintuitively named Digitab SS1078W, the largest of the three, in for review today. Let's see if Smartlink has what it takes to compete with existing local and international companies.

Look and feel
First impressions are important, and unfortunately the SS1078W did nothing to impress us when we took it out of its box. It appears to be made out of cheap plastic, like most off-brand imported products, and borrows quite a few design cues from the first-generation iPad. From a distance it doesn't look bad at all, but you can immediately feel the low quality of the body material when you first pick it up.

The SS1078W is oriented in landscape format, so the front camera is in the middle of the wider top border and all the buttons and ports are on the narrower left edge. The back is slightly curved, but this doesn't do much to mask the tablet's thickness.

A strip of black plastic wraps around the top and rear, reminiscent of the one on iPads with cellular connectivity. In this case, a plastic flap within the black strip covers the SIM card slot. This is the only thing on the top edge, as everything else is on the left edge. From top to bottom, there's a small power button, volume buttons, a physical Back button (for inexplicable reasons), a 3.5mm headset socket, mic, microSD slot, Micro-USB port, Mini-HDMI port, and DC input. That's right, this tablet does not charge over USB; there's an old-style cylindrical DC input jack. This means you'll have to carry the specific charger that comes with it everywhere you go.

The opposite edge has only a small speaker grille, and the bottom is completely blank. There isn't much to see on the back either, apart from the rear camera and a few crudely etched regulatory logos.

The front face is entirely blank, but you can see the screen set apart from its thick borders. The plastic covering the screen is not very smooth, and we found that using the SS1078W became very uncomfortable after a while because of friction. We now take touchscreens for granted, but unfortunately this one was difficult to use, especially in games that require lots of quick swiping.

Features, specifications and software
The Digitab SS1078W is based on a Rockchip RK3066, which is an ARM processor based on two Cortex A9 cores and clocked at up to 1.6GHz. This is beefier than the more common low-powered Cortex A7, and uses an integrated Mali 400MP GPU for graphics.

You get 1GB of RAM and 8GB of built-in storage space. Smartlink doesn't specify the exact Bluetooth and Wi-Fi standards supported. You get 3G data but not voice or SMS functionality. There's also no GPS, and not even an ambient light sensor to adjust brightness automatically.

The battery has a rated capacity of 8,000mAh which is a little astonishing, and both the front and rear cameras have 2-megapixel sensors.

The 10.1-inch 1280x800-pixel screen is awfully low-resolution by today's standards, and you can immediately see a grainy quality to everything when you turn it on. Colours are fairly vivid, but the overall brightness is way too low even at its highest setting. Smartlink says the screen is an IPS panel, and we did note decent viewing angles, but its overall quality is quite low.

We were most surprised by the fact that the SS1078W came running Android v4.1. It's now nearly two years old, but in user experience terms it feels like eons. By today's standards, the interface is absolutely dreadful.

For starters, the soft Back, Home and Recents buttons live in the bottom left corner, with notifications piling up on the bottom right. The shortcut to the app drawer is in the top right corner. On first boot we were greeted by a blank green homescreen without any widgets, shortcuts or buttons, and had to take a moment to orient ourselves.

Smartlink hasn't done a good job with choosing a look and feel for the UI or selecting default apps. The wallpaper is so low quality that it actually makes the screen look worse than it is. There are a few widgets scattered randomly across home screens - a clock in one corner of one, two shortcuts in the middle of another, and a bar of quick settings toggles floating to the side of a third.

The selection of preloaded apps is a little strange. There's an Explorer which looks crude but is fairly useful, an APK installer, Battery Bot (which has absolutely nothing but a large current charge level graphic and a shortcut to the battery settings page), something claiming to be a "Whatsapp installer" (which led us to a shady APK download page), and several others in a similar vein.

Some apps are potentially useful, like the Times of India, MakeMyTrip, Book My Show, and What's On India, but they're also just phone apps running on a larger screen. Others, like "Bollywood Movies" and "PK Songs Videos" are just wrappers for websites - there's even a fake IRCTC app which just leads to the mobile site. There's a Healthkart web shortcut and, inexplicably, the Medscape app for healthcare professionals. BrightCam offers a few standard but useful photo retouching tools. Financial Calculator is exactly what it sounds like, but appears to have been programmed as a middle school project.

There's even more - Opera Mini and Chrome in addition to the stock Android browser, an ASCII emoticon gallery, a dictionary, Music and Video apps, and even two games - Chess Free and Fruit Sorter - the latter of which was actually quite fun. Finally, Smartlink includes three of its own apps. DigiShare simply throws up an error saying it can't detect a dock, and provides no explanation about how it's meant to work. iView and SecureView work with the company's network-connected security cameras.

The Android 4.1 keyboard is awful, and we wish Smartlink had invested some of the time it obviously spent on app selection on working on an OS update instead. The physical Back button serves no purpose at all, but it's an example of the kind of hardware-software mismatch we see here. For a company that knows what it's doing in other areas, this first Android outing is a disappointment.

Performance
Having gone through the specifications, we weren't expecting much from the Digitab SS1078W. Our benchmark runs produced just about average results, with 14,785 in AnTuTu and 4,051 overall in Quadrant. Graphics performance was poor, with only 4.7fps in GFXbench and 2,920 in 3DMark's entry-level Ice Storm runthrough.

We found the Android interface quite sluggish, with noticeable lags when bringing up the app drawer, for instance. However apps behaved fairly well and casual games such as the preloaded ones ran without any problem. We wouldn't recommend heavy multitasking, but the SS1078W seems fine for basic Web browsing and a bit of entertainment.

720p HD movies played quite well, but there was stuttering in most of our 1080p test clips. The sound level is way too low for any useful purpose. The less said about the two 2-megapixel cameras the better - at this level, it's almost better to save money by leaving them out.

The battery lasted just under six and a half hours in our video loop test which isn't bad, but doesn't quite live up to its 8,000mAh rating.

Verdict
It isn't surprising that Smartlink has jumped into the tablet fray - everyone seems to be doing it nowadays. We just wish they understood the market better, in terms of available competition and users' expectations. We're not impressed by the app "freebies", and the use of a proprietary charger just boggles our minds.

Even at its street price of around Rs. 17,500, it's tough to recommend the Digitab SS1078W. It has no conceivable upgrade path and is not the sort of experience you would want. However, it is one of the few 10.1-inch tablets with 3G data at this price point. Also, in a sea of unknown brands and shady importers, Smartlink stands out with a nationwide after-sales service network.

Options at the same price level include the Dell Venue 8 and Google Nexus 7 (2013), but these have smaller screens and no 3G data. For a little more money, you can get a previous-generation iPad mini which is still superior in terms of user experience and apps. It seems Smartlink has found a niche and has priced itself accordingly - it's tempting, but we'd rather go with fewer features that work better together.

Smartlink Digitab SS1078W in pictures