I was a bit skeptical at first handing over my credit card information to a site I had no idea was legit or not, so I bought a pre-paid card from my bank that works the exact same way as a debit card and used that to purchase the Tablet. The store on Ramos is fairly straight forward and they do give you some options while purchasing like the option to add an extended warranty from the standard year long one which is nice but I didn't bother, the only option I chose is express shipping to the US because I wanted the thing in my hands ASAP. I ordered the tablet on 12/30/12 and because of the Holidays in my mind I wasn't really expecting it to arrive by the 2nd week of January at the soonest but to my surprise I was totally wrong. DHL isn't exactly my favorite shipping company in the world that honor goes to UPS although YMMV so to actually receive my tablet on 1/4/13 just blew me away especially because they shipped it on 1/2/13 from China.
The packaging was actually really really good they did a great job protecting their product during shipping. The box and accessories the tablet came with leave a bit to be desired. You get a micro USB cable, 2 little, I think manuals, all in Chinese and your DC adapter to charge the tablet because it doesn't charge over USB and the tablet, at least mine, came dead. After charging it for a good 30 minutes I turned it on and well it wasn't even at 3% battery so 1st impression right off the bat is this thing takes forever to charge but the screen right away is amazing. The 1920 x 1200 screen is really crisp and bright. At full brightness it actually hurts my eyes to look at it so I turned it down to about 50%. The viewing angles are great I don't know the exacts but from some extreme angles the screen didn't completely wash out. Also on the screen I'd like to make a correction to the Ramos website that states it just supports 5 Point touch, but no the Antutu Multi Touch Test showed me 10 points.
The tablet itself though is wonderful. It's really snappy with the Exynos 4412 Quad Core CPU coupled with a Quad Core Mali 400 and 2GB of RAM. It has 32GB of Storage built in and get this a MicroSD slot, which a lot of the big boys in the Tablet space keep forgetting, which accepted my 32GB Sandisk Class 10 but would not read my 64GB MicroSD. It comes with Android 4.0.4 which is alright with a promise to Jelly Bean update "Coming" and I hope really soon because here is the biggest draw back of the tablet so far the video decoding just doesn't work. Youtube greets you with a black screen whenever you try to play a video and same with Netflix and my Plex app. I tried switching on Force GPU Rendering in the developers settings but nothing works. I emailed the real Chinese Tablet site to ask if I possibly got a faulty unit or something to which they replied to me that no and they are aware of the problem and it will be resolved with a firmware update. I wrote back trying to get confirmation if it was the 4.1 update or will it be a minor update but as of this writing they haven't gotten back to me which stinks because I really wanted to like this tablet but I bought it for movies and videos and the things fails to do that. It can play 3D Games just wonderfully the CPU/GPU really shines on the Ramos. I have tried Shadowgun, Dead Trigger and Asphalt which all look and play smoothly just as long as it is rendering 3D. If any of the games, like Dead Trigger, have a video in it you will be seeing a black screen until it is over. Antutu Benchmark gave it a score of 14269 which is just shy of the international version of the Galaxy S3 which shares basically the same internals and Quadrant gave it a score of 5109 which is once again just a little bit behind the Galaxy S3 according to their apps. The battery is really the only hardware thing holding the tablet back. According to Ramos it's a 5400mAh battery which in my eyes is just too small or the battery meter is pointless in the device because just unplugging it and leaving it in standby for an hour it dropped to 92%.
Battery tests complete and here is the rundown. With the tablet set at roughly 50% and with 95% CPU Usage across all cores the tablet finally turned off at consistently around 5 hours +/- 10 minutes. With a more subjective usage like browsing the internet and streaming music from Pandora and watching a few videos in Chrome, which somehow works yet the Youtube App itself won't, it will last 7 and a half hours +/- 20 minutes for me. Now the real kicker is the 0% to 100% charge. With the tablet totally turned off and only turning it on every half hour to check the percentage it took around 9 hours +/- 30 minutes, and with the tablet left on but in standby and checking every 15 minutes it took around 10 hours and 15 minutes +/- 15 minutes. And lastly if you try to play a taxing game while charging the charger Ramos ships with the tablet does not have enough juice to keep it charging so it will lose about 1% battery every 5 to 10 minutes. Something to note about the stock battery meter is just like I feared it can be a bit pointless. A couple times the battery meter would read like 47% even charging all night yet when I restarted the tablet it shot back to 100%. Not sure if it's because the system is still learning the capacity and discharge rate but it is something to keep in mind while using it. I ran the 95% hard usage battery test 10 times to get my average and the more real life battery test I ran 7 times with letting the tablet recharge fully to 100% showing after I restarted it.
Build quality is decent. It's nice and sleek and I love the longer screen compared to my old iPad 3. The back is I think aluminum or some kind of metal or if not it's really nice plastic that does a good job tricking me it's metal but where build quality falls apart lies at the top of the tablet where there is a plastic cover covering the MicroSD and Micro USB ports. It feels flimsy and awkward and doesn't line up perfectly which drives my OCD mad looking at it. And also under the cover you can see basically all the way into the tablet which leaves me to believe dirt, dust, and anything else can easily get inside and cover the Exynos 4412 SoC. But with that being said maybe it was a design choice because during testing the back of the tablet got warm but no where near boil a pot of water hot my iPad 3 got sometimes so maybe they are there for added cooling? There are 3 physical buttons on the tablet in the upper right starting at the top with Power/Lock and then a volume rocker. They lack any real feed back so you don't quite know if you pressed hard enough or not. And on the top edge of the tablet you have 2 pin holes for Mics and your power port for your DC Charger and a headphone jack. It has a 2MP camera in the back and a .3MP camera in the front which both leave a lot more to be desired for the people that would use them but I normally use my DSLR to take pictures instead of holding up a 10" Slate but hey some people care about these kind of things and I'm not a huge Skyper or video caller so both cameras in the tablet will go un-used on mine. It has 1 speaker that is, I guess, loud enough but even when I switch to speakerphone on my S3 it's louder. It's in a weird position on the backside so all the sound is directed away from you especially when you are trying to watch something on the screen so headphones will definitely be your best bet there.
Like I said before it comes with Android 4.0.4 which isn't the latest and greatest but it works just fine minus anything to do with 2D Videos. Ramos pre-loads the tablets with a couple games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja and a bunch of Apps with Chinese or Japanese (sorry I don't know the difference) names that can all be deleted. If you press the volume up and down button and power button when the tablet is off it will boot into CWM 5.5.0.4 Recovery which lets you easily root the device which I did by putting a Super User Zip onto a MicroSD and installing it threw CWM.
All in all it's a great, cheap but flawed tablet that has a couple cosmetic issues and one big software issue that is holding it all back. At least the software issue can easily be fixed it's just a matter of if/when they release a firmware update or someone picks up the gauntlet to make a custom Rom based off the Note 2/10.1 as they share the same internals. Trust me I know how much it stinks waiting for a company to get their head out of the sand and give you an update that they promised when they released the device (Yeah I'm looking at you HTC with the Evo 3D). So because of the software fault I'm gonna have to sadly give this tablet a 6/10 for me, but whenever Ramos releases a fix for the video encoding and/or Jelly Bean the score will most definitely go up.
-Rawberrie
