Hands-on with an Android MID

0 Trackbacks (Pingbacks are enabled)

Comments Posted on Aug 21, 2009 Posted by Yellow Tiger

Shenzhen-based Eston Technology yesterday delivered two units of their latest MID to the offices of our sister site Shanzhaiben.com. The product, the ET-M43A, once featured WinCE but has now had a make-over and sports the hottest OS on the market at the moment, Android.

The first thing that was tested was the general user experience and web browsing function. Overall, browsing seems to be much faster than the WinCE version, and all made much easier with support for finger dragging and the well designed QWERTY keyboard.

Android_MID2

The ET-M43A features a 4.3-inch side-out slide touch screen and weighs only 267g - just little bit heavier than a cell phone. It has 128MB of DDR RAM, supports 256MB NAND Flash memory and a 16GB SD card, and of course Wi-Fi. The battery is 2800mAh/3.7V, which should provide a normal-use life of around 4 hours.

Android_MID3

The delivered version is a sample product only and lacks the complete suite of installed software the finished version will come with. Because of this we couldn’t fully test the product but will have some further updates about our experiences in the coming days.

Western Opportunity Analysis:

While the jury’s still out on whether Android on netbooks is a good idea, the same question seems a little more clear-cut when it comes to MIDs. With extendable storage, Wi-Fi and snappy web browsing, this device could find a nice home in Western markets provided the pricing is attractive.

Conclusions:

Eston Technology said the final product will be available on the market by the middle of next week, at which point we’ll presumably also know the price. Stay tuned.

Tags: