Gemini Devices JoyTAB! 9.7″ Tablet PC review

Not long ago, the minimum you’d pay for a decent 10in tablet was £350. Well, times are changing, and the Gemini JoyTAB! 9.7” is the cheapest 10in tablet we’ve ever seen.

As bargain basement Android tablets go, it makes a pretty good first impression. Lift the lid on the brightly coloured box, and you’ll find a well-made and reasonably attractive device. It’s clad in glossy white plastic on the rear, trimmed around the edges in matte silver, and it isn’t bulky and heavy like other cheap tablets we’ve come across. It tips the scales at 672g – around the same as an iPad 3 – and is a slim 10mm thick.

Its specification looks comprehensive, too. There’s a microSD slot for expanding the 16GB of internal storage by 64GB, there are both front and rear 2-megapixel cameras, an LED flash and Bluetooth to go with the 802.11n Wi-Fi. The only thing missing, strangely, is GPS.

Switch it on and the display surprises as much as the rest of the hardware. The resolution is 1,024 x 768, so nothing special, yet it uses the same IPS technology as the iPad, giving bright, colourful images and exceptional viewing angles. In our tests, measuring the brightness of a pure white screen at top brightness with a colorimeter, the JoyTAB!’s display attained a top brightness figure of 299cd/m2, which isn’t bad at all.

The JoyTAB!’s chipset also confounds expectations. It has an ARM-based 1.5GHz dual-core Rockchip CPU, 1GB of RAM and a quad-core Mali 400 graphics processor for gaming. The result is a surprisingly quick-feeling tablet. In the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark it scored 1,302, which is an impressive result.

We loaded a handful of demanding games onto the tablet, including the demanding Shadowgun and Asphalt 7, and found each one played smoothly, hardly dropping a frame. The JoyTAB! coped effortlessly with Full HD video playback, delivering local files and streaming online movies smoothly, and a Mini HDMI output means the tablet can output video to an HD TV, too.