The brand has been revived for a new line of laptops and tablets, sold exclusively in Walmart.
They come in some fresh colors, including the fetching teal and purple of these review units.
My results on two out of three of these gadgets were less than surprising.
(The latter was true of our review unit).
The spec list is pretty predictable for a budget tablet.
(It’s two.)
But to be frank,eighty bucksmight be a little much to ask for this thing.
Though the battery is decent when it’s running, it drains rapidly when not in use.
The real killer is the screen.
In fact, it feels like I could snap this entire tablet in half without too much trouble.
All in all, I’d recommend theAmazon Fire 8 HDover this tablet for just about anybody.
Unless getting genuine Google apps is important to you, it’s a better choice.
(Oddly, it’s$199 on the Walmart website at the time of writing.)
At first, this looks like an admittedly cheap, but serviceable, modern laptop.
It even has a couple of unexpected features like a MicroSD card slot and a mini-HDMI port.
On the occasions I could get Windows to start, I found it almost unusable.
Just getting this thing to deliver search results in the Start menu was a chore.
It runs a surprisingly long time, given all that: 8 hours.
But using this for 8 hours would be something of a gauntlet of constant frustration.
If you only have $300 to spend on a laptop, get a Chromebook.
That would be a mistake, assuming that your budget can stretch.
It lasted for about 8 hours on a charge in my testing.
Best of all: it has 16 GB of RAM.
But what really surprised me was on the bottom: an old-fashioned expansion slot!
I grabbed a screwdriver, removed the cover, and found something extremely surprising.
The only major annoyance I had with this more advanced configuration was the system’s cooling fan.
There are much worse ways to spend six hundred bucks on a laptop.
You could buy two of those 11.6-inch models, for example.
