JXD S7100 - Overview (Android gaming tablet)

Gear: JXD S7100, JXD5000, Dingoo Digital A320, JXD F3000.

The JXD S7100 is an Android powered gaming tablet. Many of today's tablets will do many touch games and the whole "gaming tablet" thing is becoming more popular. The difference of the JXD S7100 is the dedicated gaming buttons. In a way I feel like "real games require real buttons".

These dedicated buttons make the JXD S7100 look a lot like Nintendo's upcoming WiiU controller. These integrated buttons make a lot more sense than some of the concepts like Team Razer's Project Fiona concept, and WikiPad.

Hardware & software
- details on Box Contents And Images post.

Build quality
Overall the system feels fairly solid. Based on other JXD devices I was expecting a much cheaper quality product, but it does feel very solid.

Screen
The screen is nice, it's bright and colorful. Like many screens there are different viewing angle quality, full frontal being the best angle. There's support for up to five touch points and they work well.

Specs
The system comes with an ARM Cortex A9 at 800 Mhz CPU, ARM Mali 400 GPU, and 512MB DDR2. This means that it can play most Android games and apps, and will run 3D. The CPU is not as powerful as Nvidia, Omap, A5 chips, etcs.

Battery
They advertise a 3800 mAh lithium-polymer battery, which should give around 5 hours of battery life. You can increase/decrease the battery life by adjusting brightness and disabling/enabling wifi. If you lower the brightness and turn off the wifi I can see it hitting the 5 houts, with the features enabled expect less.

Unlike the previous handheld gaming emulators this system requires the AC adapter to charge. This is rather annoying because I would prefer to charge through USB.

Buttons
The gaming buttons could be better. The one thing were JXD messed up is the lack of shoulder buttons, which are needed for N64 and PSX/PS1 games. Through Android you can add these missing buttons onto the screen and that makes it into another regular tablet. The buttons can be remapped through software.

Speakers
The speakers are fine and do get loud, but they are not BlackBerry PlayBook quality speakers. Don't expect any amount of bass.

User Interface
The system ships with Android 2.2.1 which is easy to navigate. It does feel like it could use some optimization because it's slow.  Most of the apps are in Mandarin and therefore unreadable for the Western English speaking world.

Games and apps can be downloaded through included "app stores", an alternative is to download them to PC and then transfer them to the JXD S7100.

Gaming
Arcade, GBA, NES games work well.  The games are smooth and the control buttons suit these types of games.

N64 games work ok.  The games seem to have reduced resolutions, or at least removed polygons.  Because of the lack of shoulder buttons a lot of games become harder (if not impossible) to play.

PS1/PSX games don't work that well.  When I managed to get a game working they were ok, but there would be lags and eventually freeze ups.  The shoulder button issue is also a problem that makes PSX gaming not enjoyable.

Video
It can play up to 1080p video which looks very crisp. If you add these types of videos you would need to add more storage through the "TF card slot".

Price
You can get this system for $162.99 at lettouch.com (price has gone up to $169.99) The tablet is fairly inexpensive and it makes a decent buy.

Overall
It has it's pros and cons. This is far from being the complete gaming package but it's a step forward. If it had shoulder buttons it would be closer to a "real" gaming tablet. The JXD S7100 is worth getting if the games only require a few buttons.