RCA Voyager Tablet

So, what do you get for $48 in good old Canadian plastic nowadays?

Well, a bunch of outdated tech components in a cheap plastic case for sure, and to expect more would be naive, but is the group of oldish stuff capable of anything useful, and in relation to the cutting edge, or even the mediocre middle, is the money well spent?

It's a Google certified tablet, has Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and what they term a HD screen, although 1024 x 600 is hardly what I would call high definition, yet, I am reminded about the price point and I will say, the screen is fine.

5 point Multitouch touchscreen, 0.61 pounds, wifi 802,11 b/g/n and bluetooth 4.0, 1GB RAM and 16GB memory (I would not recommend any less memory in a tablet) and it has an acceptable resolution single front facing camera for Skype sessions or annoying cheeky selfies.

Antutu tells me my budget tablet is RCA, model RCT6873W42M with a 32 bit quad core MT8127 CPU with cores clocked at 13000 MHz and an ARM Mali-450 GPU. This MediaTek MT8127 is a cheap ARM SoC and was announced in 2014, Antutu goes on to tell me that the v5 benchmark is at 22387 which is around where it should be.

This mini review though is not about making a big list, because as I said in the beginning, this is a collection of older components, and two years is a long time in this industry. The list I should make is what this tablet can do, and that actually is quite a big list, because I would say that this little thing can do about 86.5% of what a basic iPad can do, and the last time I looked, even though their build quality is far superior, the cheapest iPads were selling for over six times this money.

I checked the Bluetooth, it connected well with my Logitech receiver, the Wifi seems solid enough and I've only had to reboot the tablet once in a week, there have been no forced stops yet, but I suppose we'll expect those as I add more and obscure apps. The Google suite of software that comes with the tablet run well, the play store works, Angry birds does it's thing and I can play my beloved Sudoku for hours on end.

The capacitive touchscreen is nothing to write home about, but it does it's job and overall the tablet, although completely plastic, is sturdy and has a reasonable feel to it. I added a 16GB microSD card and some music and video, everything I threw at it worked. The internet has been stable, video streaming from Youtube solid, music streaming excellent and as we're on the subject, headphone sound quality, with my good earbuds, rather good.

It works well with my Roku too.

As for battery life, I've been achieving about four hours or so, and that would drop with heavy video useage, but it is what it is, and that is what I consider acceptable at this price point. In fact, that could be the overall TOTG rating for this gizmo.

If I compare this with the tablets that I was playing with four or five years ago, it is amazing, so inexpensive and rather stable to boot, it would make a great first time tablet for any age group, and if you give it to a young child, it might get thrown out of the stroller and broken, but it will certainly not break the bank.