ZTE had a pair of tablets on-hand at Mobile World Congress – the V9 and the V9 Plus. The short story: the V9 left a bad taste in my mouth, and moving on to the Plus made it a bit more tolerable. It’s clear ZTE’s still looking to hang around the low-end market for at least the first half of this year.
Both devices are 7 inch tablets running Android – not Honeycomb, unfortunately – and its resolution is only WVGA. Certainly not the high-end beast I thought I’d be checking out when ZTE’s Vice President said they were looking to take that next step.
And the V9 itself was just bad. I often had to press things twice to open them, swiping between homescreens was a pain, and it only has Android 2.1. Even in a world of Honeycomb, I would’ve appreciated Froyo, at least.
The V9 Plus was a bit better: it adds Android 2.2 and a 1GHz processor. The bump in speed beneath the hood translated well to user experience, though. I had no trouble doing what I wanted to do, but it wasn’t blazingly fast.
ZTE’s always been known as a low-end manufacturer, and while they had hoped things would change in 2011, it hasn’t. I’m hoping they really upgrade their wares as their competitor Huawei has as competition is key and they’ll be well-positioned with handsets in all financial levels of the market.