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Alcatel 3T 10 Tablet: OK, with bouts of intense frustration...

ScottishStoic
Level 1: Joiner
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Registered:

I upgraded at the start of May, and as part of my upgrade I got an offer to get the Alcatel 3T 10 with free Audio Station and an extra 25GB data a month. I don't have a laptop at the moment so a tablet would be useful, so I went ahead with it. The outcome has been a mixed bag varying from OK to extremely frustrating.

POSITIVES (this will be quick...)
The Audio Station is great. You can charge the tablet straight through the station, the sound quality is good (I connect it to my phone or my tablet, depending on what I'm doing).

The tablet is a good size; nice screen resolution, pretty responsive to touch, and even without the Audio Station you get decent sound quality.

As a hub for streaming audio & video on a wifi connection, this is pretty good at a low price. I don't currently have WiFi, which means the negatives below are greatly amplified.

NEGATIVES (extremely negative...)
Tiny internal memory. 16GB sounds a lot, but once I had downloaded all the apps I needed (not nearly as many as on my phone) I was left with 4GB internal memory. Again, sounds like a lot, but if you're looking to download video etc for offline viewing, this is going to run out fast... The obvious solution would be to ramp up the memory by using an SD card, which I did. Which leads us to...

The apps available for the tablet do not play well with SD cards! I added a 32GB SD card, enough for music, video and ebook downloads. However, the vast majority of apps which require a lot of storage DO NOT ALLOW YOU TO USE EXTERNAL STORAGE unlike their equivalent versions on an Android phone. For example, neither Amazon Prime Video nor Amazon Kindle on this tablet give you the option of downloading to the SD card, whereas I can on my phone. Other apps have the same problem. You can get round this by moving apps to the SD card using the Storage Manager, however...

Some apps disappear after reboot, especially if they were moved to the SD card. The Netflix app is particularly bad for this. I've installed it and moved to the SD card. After reboot, all that is left is a broken app symbol. So I installed it to the internal memory. It vanishes after reboot. Same with Wordpress. You have to download and install them both again.

For the Kindle app, it gets worse. If you move it to the SD card not only does it vanish, but you can't reinstall it as it claims there is an incompatible version installed by another user on the app. You need to completely reformat the SD card (losing any books you downloaded and moved to there) before you can install it again.

To avoid the above, you just need to avoid rebooting the tablet. Easy enough. Except it has a habit of unexpectedly and randomly rebooting overnight.

For on the move checking of email, websites, and streaming of low quality or short video (if you have a good data allowance) this tablet does the job, but anyone planning on downloading video so they can watch shows & movies on the go, at a decent quality, without rinsing out their data allowance, is going to be sorely disappointed.

Overall this tablet does an average job for most things. It's easier for me to work with documents on it, it offers a better size screen for text, photos, video etc. But for things you'd expect to use a tablet for, like video, I'm back to using my phone. If it were costing me more, I'd be asking for my money back from O2. Once I get broadband sorted out it won't be such a problem, and I'll probably feel more kindly disposed towards it.

TL;DR - get it if you're happy with the basics, or only want to stream video via WiFi. If you want something better than that, spend the extra money to get something better.

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