Gadgetory

it's been a long time since we've done an unboxing in the camera man's office as you can see it's kind of gone to ruin in the time that I haven't been here to to help him clear space from time to time got a little game controllers not that the cameraman has any idea how to play games being a Mac guy all that okay camera man we're doing some cleanup he's got his precious Bunny all over the place some wonder he has any money he spent so much on making sure that he has a Mac instead of getting a PC which is a better value mmm okay so today we have something totally unrelated to Mac or PC this is actually an Android tablet this is the crues tablet from velocity micro and it looks pretty cool so first things first we got a sticker on the front Kindle for Android so you can read more than 725,000 Kindle books with free applications with the free applications on the cruise tablet if you are a non-us customer book availability may vary so that might be relevant to me given I am here in the great white north of canada alright let's see what they had to say for themselves on the box so you can view your cruise tablet at the right angle with the cruise stand so there's a stand dimensions you got the compatible products there's a little stand okay I don't know that it comes with that I guess we'll find out here on the back little something all the applications you need in the palm of your head and here's our specs so it has a 7 inch slim TFT so that basically just means LCD screen 800 by 600 capacitive touch it is a 4 to 3 aspect ratio so that's interesting this is not widescreen it runs on Android 2.0 has a browser ok 256 Meg's of RAM 4 gigs a built-in storage with a four gig external sd card but you can't expand that it comes with Wi-Fi it has a G sensor battery is up to 6 hours of watching video we've got dimensions here but we're gonna pull it out and show you guys later it has support for SDHC so you can support up to I believe it's 32 gigs on SDHC video playback is here reader files stand all the stand is included there you go here's all a few different things that you can do to surf the web use the online bookstore you can access your social media really it's app driven much like any Android device you can watch videos view documents it has a dictionary I don't know why we would necessarily call it the dictionary but whatever manage your files and has a g-sensor so it will automatically rotate from portrait to landscape more features here which we've pretty much covered most of those also includes an alarm clock apparently a calculator I mean it better including a calculator and you know this kind of a price point and this advanced a device okay so packaging wise here we go we have a white box which has more of a white box on the inside there's the tablet itself I'm not gonna show you that just yet here is a nice little okay there's our included four gig SanDisk SDHC card here is a little sleeve which includes some information about the warranty so there's our SD card here's a limited warranty okay something about one year okay so it has a one-year warranty next we've got a Quick Start Guide why don't we have a look at that after we turn it on and then we have a little little sort of foamy sleeve for it so that's pretty nice actually alright here's the little cruise stand so you can use it up the correct angle alright and then we have a charger so that's it fairly simple accessory package let's have a look at the crews tablet itself it's got a little bit of a heft to it but it's more of a it's more of a feel solid weight than a feels heavy weight kind of like the iPhone 4 like the iPhone 4 it's heavy but it's just heavy because it's like feels solidly built so I'm gonna go ahead and try and find the power button which is here so let's not let's wait for it to power on while we show you guys all the other buttons so we've got reset check it out USB that's something your iPhone doesn't have okay there's our SD slot so that's your expandable storage up to 32 gigs on this side we've got volume controls up and down we've got a little bit of cruise branding going on there moving along to the bottom we've got a headphone jack some kind of indicator LED we have speakers which are built right into the bottom here as well as our power in and then the other side nothing so it's got a fairly clean overall look to the outside of it on the back you just see a little Velocity Micro logo Cruz tablet you got your serial number as well as some FCC you know it complies with part whatever or whatever here we've got Android booting up now and why don't we wait for it to boot up and then we'll be back and yeah it's not quite booted up yet so let's boot it up camera man's gesturing to me so I guess we better do that oh look there we go so the screen is right away nice and vibrant I'm gonna see if I can find some I think here is settings yep so let's play around with some of these stuff so we've got Wireless and networks works pretty much like any other Android device so we've got our navigation up here move it down a little bit there we go let's see I want screen is a big one for me so let's see what the display is gonna look like if we tinker around with a little bit some brightness it's out it's maximum brightness right now it goes all the way down to here so I'd say sort of a happy medium is probably right there around 35 to 40% that's where I usually end up when I'm using any of these kinds of devices though this one seems to have a full charge on it right now we can show animations cool so does that yeah there we go so now the now the screens are going to be animating ah you know what give me a second to get connected to the Wi-Fi and then we'll go a little further into this so here we go we got the Android app store installed it actually didn't come with that pre-installed on the tablet which is a very strange thing to me but here it is so I just downloaded Angry Birds connecting to the Wi-Fi only took me a couple minutes which is pretty cool just had to enter the password for the Wi-Fi here at the office using the app store is pretty much like using the app store on my friend's phone back when I was deciding whether to get here let me see where's like here what I mean see if there's like a Facebook app or something back when I was deciding whether to get the Galaxy S vibrant or the iPhone 4 although the cameraman did bring my attention to the fact that Android 2.0 what this guy's running is not really that similar to the to the Android that is running on the phones that are out there right now it's slightly more up-to-date so this is what there is for facebook why don't we just have a look and see if our Angry Birds is done not just yet so let's set you know okay I have to criticize a couple things it's not as fast as I would ideally like it's not quite as the screens not quite as bright as I would ideally like but it's got a lot going for it and that is that the price is really low so this thing is less than two hundred and fifty bucks at retail it does have the agreement in place with Amazon where you can use it as a kindle e-book reader so that makes it it puts it down in that ebook price point where it becomes very a very good value proposition and you don't really need the speed for those kinds of applications so here you can just sign in with your Amazon credentials okay so why don't we go ahead and check out Angry Birds here see how well that runs on this little tablet of course that's what I would care about right do I wanna install this application yep okay we'll come back once it's installed okay we weren't able to install Angry Birds what I've discovered is that that app store is not actually like the Android Market that I'm familiar with so it doesn't have some of the same good stuff in it we did find a YouTube app though in the in the cruise app store and there's also a Facebook one in there so let's see how well the YouTube one works I'm just running one of my own YouTube videos this is a 720p video hmm okay let's see if there's a way to run this in higher quality I'll be back in a minute so we were watching it in horrible quality why don't we watch in normal quality that might help a little bit say a little bit I don't really see anywhere to adjust the volume hold on okay details comments oh I can rate my video yes okay well I think that they're probably focusing on the correct marketing points on the box when they emphasize it as like a Kindle reader because with the overall build of it feeling very solid very nice and the the screen being quite adequate I think that it would make for like a great ebook reader and since there you can access the internet on it and we'll show you the browsing speed in just a moment here here let's try this one more time watching normal quality let's see if it gets any better it's probably buffering right now okay let's show you guys the browser so we're gonna go to NCI XCOM okay press home okay we got a browser doo doo and C I hex com let's go there oops okay let's try that again NCI XCOM go let's try that Go button that might work better so here's where we downloaded the YouTube view 1.3 because you can see it's not a huge it's not like an android youtube app it's like specifically for the cruise reader so I think they probably still got some work to do as far as the app development goes and once once those mature a little bit once the installed base of these devices gets a little bit wider than I think we'll see some definite improvements in the overall and the overall responsiveness of the apps here we go so we're loading up the NCIX site oh you can double tap to zoom in and zoom out so that's kind of neat I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna check out the forums you can see we've got st. Patrick's deals going on on NCI XCOM right now so we've moved significantly closer to our access point and we're actually having a little bit more success with the browsing speed okay so let's go to you know the main form home so basically I think the conclusion at this point is that as an e-reader or for checking email actually this is pretty unbeatable for the price but I wouldn't expect to be doing any heavy lifting let's see if we can get it to brows a little bit faster now because I did have some success of a faster browsing so here we go now we can navigate so I'm quite close to my access point from here and that's giving me some more success although it's still not fast by any stretch of the imagination for mobile browsing but I mean it's more than adequate for like email or whatever the case may be so thank you for checking out this video on the velocity micro cruise tablet don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos