AOC Breeze Tablet

I really wanted to play with an Android device, but I really love my Blackberry Torch and don't want to switch away from that as a phone. When I saw the $159.99 AOC Breeze 8" Tablet (MW0811) hit the shelves at Fry's, I figured why not give it a shot.

The Breeze is a perfect example of "you get what you pay for." While the tablet works, it has some serious limitations and one deal-breaker (and in the end, I ended up eating a restocking fee to return it to Fry's. Damn you Fry's and your restocking fee!) 

Let me write a quick review of the device.

Pros:

• Cheap. Like really, really inexpensive.
• Android Market included. Yup, Google Android Market somehow works on this thing and that's a great thing since you can get all the apps you want through it without having to hack Market onto the device.
• It is near stock Android 2.1. I'm sure AOC did not want to put too much work into customizing the OS and that's actually a good thing.
• It works for basic stuff. Web browsing, email, music listening, video watching, and social networking. That stuff works, albeit a little slowly. I was surprised by the video playback from the device as it plays videos very smoothly.
• Memory -- 4GB built-in and expandable up to 16GB via MicroSDHC.

• It's really, really, REALLY slow. Don't expect to play games on this thing. It's processor can't handle anything. Angry Birds took three or four minutes to just start. And playing the game was painful.
• The touchscreen is resistive. That's not always a bad thing, but this one was not very sensitive. Swiping usually did not work. Scrolling through lists usually ended up only selecting the item that you started the scroll with.  Pushing on anything required quite a good push (like screen bending). 
• Some Android stuff just didn't work -- for example, Amazon's AppStore.
• The screen. It's pretty dim when set at its brightest. And while it has a 800x600 resolution, it has such low pixel density that I could see the pixels and text was fuzzy.
• The OS image that is loaded on the device when I received it (110311.xxxxx.128en) was pretty crappy and random things did not work (like screen locking). The restore OS image found on AOC's support page was a lower rev of the OS, but worked a lot better.
• This is the deal-breaker: The device would turn off randomly, but that in itself is not a bad thing. What was bad was that I could not turn it back on without plugging the AC power in first -- and after it booted, the battery level was at 100% (happened three times).