NXG Xtab A10 Plus: Low on Hype, Loud on Performance

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Gopalkrishna Iyer is an artist, graphic designer and a marketing consultant who was tired of lugging his ‘heavy laptop to his clients’. A tablet was best suited to his needs – making PowerPoint presentations and showing slides of his portfolio – but he says it wasn’t an easy choice. Either you had the premium tabs in the league of the iPad and the Samsung Galaxy, or a plethora of unknown budget brands with no reliable information or warranty assurance.

The NXG Xtab A10 Plus was a discovery

A search for the popular Micromax Funbook led him to an innocuous review of the homegrown NXG Xtab A10 plus, and he followed up on it to find that reviewers had rated the tab highly in its segment, even better than the Funbook. He went on to the manufacturer’s website and felt they understood the needs of the Indian consumer, and purchased the Xtab A10 Plus from the website itself.

Points in favour:

• It is slim, 8 mm to be exact
• It is a rooted tab, which means that you can download many applications without losing the warranty, which is something few tablets offer
• The touch screen is pretty responsive, though not comparable with high-end tablets
• The display: resolution and colours. You can watch films in high-definition
• The text and images do not pixalize on zooming
• It is voice-responsive
• The Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 lets him group his apps into categories
• He can connect a mouse and keypad to it and make presentations on the tab itself
• His family can use it for browsing, gaming, while his purpose of making presentations and showcasing them is also served. So, it is a complete family product

Points against:

• The accessories were substandard: the charger broke on Day 1 and the USB cable did not work at all. The earphones, says Gopal, were primitive. He added that he wished the company had spent less on packaging and paid more attention to the accessories
• Surprisingly, the manual does not have much to say about the features of the product or the operating system. In fact, a lot of it is in Chinese. In short, Gopal had to educate himself on how the tablet functions
• The slots have nothing printed next to them, so he had to figure out what each slot was for
• The tab does not have Bluetooth
• It does not have FM radio, which Gopal would have liked
• The speakers are really no good, so you have to use headphones to enjoy your HD movie or listen to songs
• The 0.3-megapixel front camera and the 8-megapixel rear camera are mediocre and turn out very grainy images in low-light conditions

Long boot time:

The boot time is over a minute and the tab also takes some time to open Microsoft Word documents and the video player. Some of it perhaps has to do with the fact the Gopal had loaded almost 800MB of apps onto his tablet to test its limits

Connectivity issues:

The Xtab A10 Plus does not support SIM cards, but you can use a dongle. But not just any dongle, as Gopal found out. He used dongles of five different service providers, but none were compatible. So he had to get the correct specifics of compatible dongles from the NXG blog.

Gaming experience:

A TechTree review says the tab is ‘miles ahead’ of its competitors in terms of processing speed.  It adds:  “The onboard browser has sleek looks and fast rendering time. Coming to the subject of gaming, the Xtab A10 Plus showed no signs of stutter while playing popular games such as Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja.

Get all the specifications from the XG official site here.

Product: NXG Xtab A10 Plus

Price: Rs. 7,990