Advent Vega Tegra Note review

Nvidia’s Tegra 4 chipset uses five processor cores; four high performance cores for running apps and games, and a fifth power-saving core that runs in the background when the tablet’s on standby. This core arrangement should reduce battery drain when running less intensive apps too; we saw this in effect during our video rundown test, where the Tegra Note lasted an impressive 11 hours and 34 minutes on a single charge. That’s a few hours longer than a Nexus 7 and over half an hour more than our current budget favourite, the Asus MemoPad HD 7.

When you need performance, though, the four high performance cores don’t disappoint. The Tegra Note completed the SunSpider benchmark in an impressive 635.6ms, which is even quicker than the Google Nexus 7’s 1132ms score. This means you’ll have no problem browsing the web, and 2D applications will pose no problem for the Tegra Note. Its graphics processing impressed us too, as the Tegra Note scored “maxed out” in both the standard and Extreme 3DMark Ice Storm tests and 14810 in the Unlimited test. This makes the Tegra Note a great bargain tablet if you want to play games.

Android feels particularly snappy, probably because there are no custom skins layered on top of the default interface. Home screens, the app drawer and apps open quickly and animate smoothly, showing no sign of slowdown. The only tweaks to the operating system are a few extra shortcuts in the quick settings panel and two additional icons in the menu bar, and these only only appear when you remove the stylus from its slot. The first icon locks the screen to all inputs except the stylus, which is useful when sketching or writing notes, while the second is a screenshot tool. You can make custom selections with the stylus, then annotate and share them instantly.

Unsheathing the stylus also opens a pop-up launcher that can store all the apps designed for stylus input. The Tegra Note includes Tegra Draw, a rudimentary painting app with a limited set of brushes and features, and Write, which is designed for basic note taking. Both work well considering pressure detection is managed purely in software; there’s a very slight delay when drawing long lines, but we could still sketch and illustrate with greater accuracy than by touch alone.

The Advent Tegra Note is a real bargain, especially when you consider its fast processor, great battery life and its stylus support. You can’t get a better tablet than the Tegra Note without spending significantly more.