MSI WindPad Enjoy 10 Review

We’ve got a slurry of Android tablets in the market with not a lot of difference between most of them and the number isn’t going to decrease any time soon. So, what do you do to get noticed in the crowd? You put in stuff that quite a few manufacturers have omitted (Read: USB OTG, keyboard connectivity, HDMI, larger screen), but still keep the price tag at the lower end. That’s exactly what MSI have done with their WindPad Enjoy 10. But, does that spell success for this tablet over its other Android counterparts? Let’s find out. 

On video: MSI WindPad Enjoy 10

Design and Build Quality

The WindPad quite surprised us when we removed our review unit from the box. Thin, smooth finish, rounded edges and a nice steel and matte combo finish at the back, immediately meant that this one was way above the cheap plastic ones, we’ve reviewed in the past. The only glossy bit is along the edges on the front of the tablet and there’s equal amount of bezel on all the sides of this slate. 

Connectivity ports

If you’ll glance over to the left, you’ll find a range of connectivity options for the WindPad. Firstly, there’s a power port, two mini USB ports, a headphone jack, an HDMI port, the volume rocker and a lock button. The microSD card slot is located at the back, underneath a rather huge flap. The speakers are located at the back as well. The front consists of an ambient light sensor and four capacitive buttons with haptic feedback, next to the 10-inch display that has a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels.

From all sides

With bigger tablets, there’s always this worry of dropping them if there’s uneven weight distribution, but the Enjoy 10 doesn’t have any problem, whatsoever. It’s easy to hold with one hand and the ergonomics section has been covered well. At 800g, it’s definitely not the lightest tablet around but they’ve not compromised on the design or the build of this nice looking tablet. 

Features and Performance

Interface

The WindPad Enjoy 10 is powered by a 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor with 512 MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage. It runs on Honeycomb Android 2.3 and we’re not too sure if this will get an ICS update. They’ve not done too much to the stock Gingerbread interface. With those specs, the Enjoy 10 seems to be able to handle it all on paper, but that’s where the good part ends. The tablet is extremely sluggish. Simply opening up the menu shows a lot of framing and manouvering through the homescreen, the menu is extremely slow. So much that this tablet might just give you a lesson on the important of patience, if you’ve not smashed it to pieces already. We tried putting a third party launcher and things did seem to improve a bit, but again problems started cropping up, while typing on the keyboard. So much lag between a key press being registered on the screen is just not acceptable. Multitasking is an absolute no brainer, out here.  We’ll give you an example – a lot of times, music tracks start chopping, if you have music playing in the background and you open another application. 

Sluggish interface

We’ll rant a little about the display as well. Poor resolution, poor viewing angles make viewing the screen a sore experience. In all fairness, it’s not the worst out there, but definitely not something you’d want on a 10 incher. 

The tablet got a score of 2064 in our AnTuTu benchmark test, which was at least better than 1726 points that the similar priced Swingtel Hello tab got, in our earlier review. In Linpack, the Enjoy 10 got a score of 13.6MFLOPS in the single thread test and a score of 11.8MFLOPS in the multi thread test, which was definitely not impressive and even the cheaper TabPlus Rio got a better score. 

Media

The onboard media player may have a bare bones feel to it, but guess what, it’s more than equipped to play a large amount of varied formats. 1080p videos played superbly with absolutely no stuttering or lag. The audio quality via both the headphones and speakers is quite loud and clear. The speakers especially were louder than a lot of the other tablets we’ve seen in the recent past.

Bare bones interface

The sound effects tab allows you to choose from a range of preset equalizers, alternatively you can have your own custom equalizer. LRC has been embedded as well, so the lyrics will appear on the screen as the song progresses. The media player is good, but if you want to use this tablet primarily to view movies, you’ll have to make do with the limited viewing angles.

Browser supports flash

Connectivity

The WindPad comes with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but there’s no 3G or GPS. There’s no Wi-Fi hotspot capability out of the box either, but they’ve got a few other interesting connectivity options. There’s HDMI out, mini USB for USB on the go and a second mini USB for connecting a keyboard and mouse. Loading webpages is a tad slower than we’ve seen on other tablets, but there’s support for Flash. USB OTG works quite well and we had absolutely no problems playing back a 1080p video directly from a 32GB pen drive attached to the tablet. Keyboard and mouse work quite well, too and they do help that wee bit in improving the speed of the sluggish interface. There’s a secondary keyboard pre-installed onto the tablet and we found it much more comfortable than the stock one. 

Misc. Apps

The tablet comes pre-installed with a host of applications. There’s Yozo Office for your document writing needs; Shelves – that’s similar to iBooks for the iPad; Evernote – for taking notes; Astro file manager and a mysterious app called Fuugo. Mysterious because the application’s license had expired without us even starting it. 

A screenshot of Shelves

A few Gameloft games have been pre-installed as well – and they work just fine. Hero of Sparta, Dungeon Hunter, Asphalt 5 and Gun Bros come along with the tablet. There are quite a few number of applications and games, but be warned, you’ll need quite a bit of patience till they actually start after you’ve click on them. Any extra keypresses during the load time, and the tablet will just get stuck. Once, they’ve started however, it’s a pretty smooth experience. Camera

The WindPad comes with dual cameras – a rear 2 megapixel and a front 2 megapixel camera. Somehow, they don’t seem to have the same image quality though. While the rear camera dishes out strictly average pictures, the front camera is quite appalling. Images are hazy and choppy and we had big problems using it for video calls.

Poor camera

Video shooting is a no go as well, because any movement and the camera starts capturing choppy images, it’s not smooth at all. The camera department is another low after the user interface for the Enjoy 10.

Average snaps

Battery Life

The WindPad 10 comes with a 3500 mAh Lithuim-ion battery and according to the company, it’s capable of 6 hours of video playback. However, in our video loop test we were quite pleased to see that the tablet outperformed that listing, it lasted for a full seven and a half hours. What’s impressive is that we had cranked the brightness up to the max and had Wi-Fi active throughout that time period. The battery life is definitely brilliant. 

If only it had a faster UI..

Verdict

The MSI WindPad Enjoy 10 is priced at Rs.16,999 (MRP). In our quest for more patience review for this tablet, the only major problem we actually had was the lack of a fluid user interface, which has been one of the crucial factors why we’ve given the tablet this rating. Had it been quicker, our rating would have definitely gone a few notches higher. So, if not this, then what? Well, the 17K price tag hasn’t really been breached by an impressive 10-inch tablet still, so in our suggestion, you’d be better off holding on to your money, than splurging on something you’d regret later on. If you’re hell bent on getting a tablet in a similar price bracket, we’d recommend the Motorola Xoom (Wi-Fi only version) considering it’s selling for Rs.19,990 and has 32GB of inbuilt memory. It's back to the drawing board for MSI.