A700 First impressions and ramblings

Harhumph

Member
Jun 22, 2012
9
1
Yes I bought one on Friday night at the local Fry's Electronics. I have 15 days to find out if it is a worthy successor to the A500 before I keep it or return it.

With the tablet being virgin, I ran two benchmarks and the tablet scored slightly lower than the Transformer Prime which was a surprise. I believe Quadrant said around 3350, and AnTuTu benchmark was 10,313. Not bad but not awesome, I am confident rooting and setting the cpu at max speed at all times will improve, but for now I have to deal with the throttling built in with the cpu. I can verify the screen does not have the screen door/grid effect of the A500 (nice!). I have put the bluetooth thru the paces and it works well. GPS is slightly above average it is not perfect but it works. My Galaxy SII has a 9/10 GPS and works really well, my A500 I give 6/10 on GPS, this is right in the middle, I give it 7.5/10. Battery life is nowhere near 10 to 12 hours, I averaged about 6 to 7 on my first two charges, again with 100% brightness and extreme use at all times, you may get better. Tablet gets very warm/hot almost all the time I use it, A500 did not do this, maybe an issue for some, and it may even interfere with wifi signal, I need more time to confirm. Once I decide I am keeping this then a case should hide the heat, right now it is very noticeable. The nice thing is you can remove the bloatware on this thing (very cool). On your homescreen click on the top right 6 dot grid to get to your Apps and widgets and long press on a bloatware app then drag it to app info instead of putting the shortcut on your home screen, you then have an option to force stop and/or disable (nice). I have verified with task killer that the app no longer auto runs in the background. By doing this I have on average 500 to 600 meg free ram at most times which is very cool. 1080p mkv and mp4 bluray rips of movies do work even with the stock video player app, I was not expecting this and it is a huge plus. HDMI out for movies is acceptable, is it as good as an actual bluray, no way, but it is 85% as good and good enough for me. Speakers are ok on this thing, not great, the dolby mobile will enhance the sound, but it will make any decent external speakers sound like crap. I recommend only using it to boost the internal speaker volume as needed, otherwise keep it off as the unnatural bass it produces is horrendous. Finally, tablet gets warms when charging, tablet charges very very slowly when screen is on, very disappointing as the A500 charged crazy fast whether screen was on or off, clearly this screen is a monster battery hog.

There you have it, first impressions, I am on the fence about keeping it right now after 2 days. One week at work tethering to it should make up mind by next weekend.

Ask away if you have any questions!
 

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
Harhump:

There is no shortage of Paragraphs, so feel free to use a few. :p

My theory on battery life is run the thing down to auto-shutoff, then recharge over night.
This educates the charge controller chip just how far the battery can go before the battery protection circuit kicks in
and takes the battery off line. So the chip will see the absolute bottom and the absolute top. It will then know what
your battery can really do.

I don't recommend this as a daily practice. Just once every 3 months or so, and it will probably happen in the normal
course of business.

Also, don't worry about battery for the first week when you are in the "Can't keep my hands off of it phase".
 
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Harhumph

Member
Jun 22, 2012
9
1
Headphone jack output is way lower than the A500, this alone really sucks and is a huge minus for me.

Bloatware seems to stay gone when you reboot which is good.

My rooted A500 still feels faster overall, but I doubt I can get this rooted safely before my 15 days are up, so I am in a pickle and not sure what to do.

Battery life is definitely better than the A500 but not triple better, maybe twice as good.

Even though I tell the tablet not to shut off wifi when the screen is off, I can tell my torrents stop downloading and will only download with the screen on? WTF is up with that can anyone else confirm?

The HD video playback is the only thing making me want to keep this thing so far, I hope I will like it more with root access.
 

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
1) Turn off Ring in settings, and things get faster.
2) others are seeing wifi go to sleep with screen off too. Double check your settings, unset, and set it again, then reboot. Also try leaving bluetooth on even if you don't need it, This definitally helped the A500, and may help the A700 as well.
 

Harhumph

Member
Jun 22, 2012
9
1
Thanks Ice, I will report back tonight, as I will try to download a random torrent file tonight with the screen off and see if leaving bluetooth on and resetting the wifi settings and rebooting fixes the problem!
 

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
Thanks Ice, I will report back tonight, as I will try to download a random torrent file tonight with the screen off and see if leaving bluetooth on and resetting the wifi settings and rebooting fixes the problem!

Also remember that you have a 5 core device. Quad core processor, and an additional 5th core that handles low power tasks when the
tablet is asleep and not doing anything that requires a lot of processing power.

4x 1.3GHz Cortex-A9 Harvard Superscalar primary cores, 1x 500MHz Cortex-A9 Harvard Superscalar companion core,

See:
NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30S (Kal-El) Multi-core Application Processor Datasheet | CPUlist | PDAdb.net

I wonder if your Torrents running with screen off drop into the 5th core and the other ones shut down to save
battery? #5 is only 500mhz, so it could slow things down quite a bit.
 

Harhumph

Member
Jun 22, 2012
9
1
OK, final verdict, I am factory resetting and returning the A700, it will not be the successor to my A500. Wifi sucks, headphone jack audio output is horrible compared to A500, the heat this thing produces, I could go on. The thing cannot charge when the screen is on, it can hold steady at its current battery level at best. I am so disappointed, but glad I bought local versus dealing with an amazon return. I will wait another 6 months and see what is out there at that time. My A500 is seriously faster than this thing on all levels but HD video playback. The screen was pretty though! My A500 can jump around from screen to screen and app to app 5 times faster than the A700. I hope you guys can tough it out better than I could...
 

Harhumph

Member
Jun 22, 2012
9
1
Oh final note my A500 never had the wifi sleep problem so that might have pushed me over the edge! All attempts to fix this with the A700 failed!
 

Icebike

Senior Member
Apr 28, 2011
1,523
186
Oh final note my A500 never had the wifi sleep problem so that might have pushed me over the edge! All attempts to fix this with the A700 failed!

Too bad, you must have gotten a lemon.
I've seen no heat problems, at least nothing out of the ordinary, my A500 also got warm when playing some games, or even running Google EARTH.
With twice the processing power, its not unexpected that the 700 would produce some heat.

I have exactly zero problems with the audio out. With Dolby on or off its great for feeding into an external amp, or high quality phones, with Dolby on, it sounds good in earbuds.

I've seen nothing about this tablet that I am disappointed in, nothing that would pry it out of my hands.

Sent from my A700 using Tapatalk 2
 
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trrt

Member
Sep 22, 2012
1
0
Recently purchased an A700 and haven't encountered any problems with screen sensitivity at all. Honestly have never had to press anything twice. Also haven't noticed excessive heat either. I am extremely happy with the capability and performance of this tablet. The display is outstanding and the ability to manage your own files with USB support makes the A700 so much more useful than an iPad (expensive toy). I found the difference between having the Ring on or off negligible - smooth and fast either way. Haven't had wifi drop off at all ... maybe I have just been lucky. I would buy another one these in a heartbeat.
 

ExtremeRyno

Member
Jan 16, 2011
179
10
I love mine. It's really grown on me, and I can ignore the faults for now. I'm just waiting patiently for Jelly Bean to come out so I can root again. I'm missing being able to play my games with my PS3 controller (requires root for the Sixaxis program).
 
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