Prestigio MultiPad 4 Quantum 10.1, First Take: Low-cost business tablet
Low-cost Android tablets are everywhere these days. Even (UK) high-street names such as Argos and Tesco are getting in on the act with the MyTablet and Hudl respectively. For business users, a tablet has to cater for productivity, particularly document editing and creation, and the £170 (inc. VAT) Presgitio MultiPad 4 Quantum 10.1 steals a march over the low-cost competition in this respect.
Presgitio has equipped the MultiPad 4 Quantum 10.1 with basic front (0.3-megapixel) and rear (2-megapixel) cameras, a moderate-resolution (1,280-by-800-pixel) screen with good viewing angles, and a 1.6GHz quad-core ARM SoC from Rockchip supported by 1GB of RAM.
It might not sound like the businessperson's dream, and the above features indicate where cost savings have been made. On the other hand, there's Mini-HDMI-out via a dedicated on-chassis port in case you need to screen-share, plus a MicroSD card slot for augmenting the relatively meagre 8GB of internal storage (which is reduced to around 5.5GB after Android 4.2 takes its quota).
And despite costing a modest £170 (inc. VAT), Prestigio provides a reasonably solid case for the MultiPad 4 Quantum 10.1, making it easy to pop into your bag and keep well protected.
There's no mobile broadband support, so if you need mobile data you'll have to share connectivity from another device. That's hardly a trial these days, with most handsets offering easily configurable mobile data sharing over wi-fi.
Business features
What really makes this tablet alluring for word-workers is the combination of its support for USB Host and pre-installation of a productivity suite called MobiSystems OfficeSuite.
The USB Host setup needs a dongle for the Micro-USB slot on the device's chassis, and Prestigio provides this. All you need to do, then, is plug in a keyboard, or obtain a splitter if you want both keyboard and mouse, and you're ready to start creating or editing documents. We were up and running within 10 minutes of switching the device on for the first time.
MobiSystems OfficeSuite lets you create documents, spreadsheets and presentations that are compatible with Microsoft Office. It'll save documents locally or to cloud storage services such as Drive, Dropbox and SkyDrive. You get the latest version of the suite.
USB Host is good for other things too. The tablet has a file explorer on-board, and we were able to run movies, access presentations and play music from an attached USB stick. There's nothing to stop you working to and from external storage.
If you're considering using a tablet for business productivity, the Prestigio MultiPad 4 Quantum 10.1 provides a ready-made opportunity to test the tablet waters without spending too much.