Received my Arnova 8 G2 last Thursday afternoon and have been putting it thru its paces. Here are a couple of early thoughts.
The first thing I want to mention is the lack of accurate specs on the online selling sites. I was never sure what I was going to get. Here is a link to accurate specs that match the actual Arnova 8 G2:
http://arnovatech.com/products/g2/arn_8 ... us&lang=en
When they say "speaker" there is only one. When they say 490g that is exactly what it weighed out to be.
It feels nice and solid not at all cheap. It is shiny black front and back but not slippery. It has a two touch capacitive screen (pinch to zoom works well) that is as responsive as my Thrive. The screen is not nearly as bad as my Thrive to show fingerprints. Not to shabby. The viewing angle is not to good but every thing is nice and crisp. I give a big thumbs up on the screen.
It looks like I am going to get more than 8 hours of battery life in average use and more than 10 hours reading with the wifi off. I ran thru the set up wizard and then gave it a full charge (I think - 99%). After 4 hours of loading and testing apps, surfing the web and seeing how it handled video I still had 61% remaining.
Rockchip claims that their RK2918 processor has a better performance than the Samsung Hummingbird in the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7. They made a believer out of me. For a 1 Ghz single core processor this thing zips right along.
Video is where this thing really shines! It did a great job with YouTube and using MX Video Player played videos in every format I have - no exceptions. AVI (DIVX and XVID), FLV, MPEG-4, MP4, and WMV all played with no problems. I played a couple of 720p movies and they rendered beautifully, no burps or hiccups. I give another big thumps up on the video.
The WiFi is strong - I can see my neighbors routers and as such allowed pretty decent surfing. I was using the built in browser but plan on trying others to see what happens.
The single speaker is about as good as you are going to get with a tablet, but earbuds give good quality sound albeit not enough volume to hurt the ears.
As far as setting up a host port for thumb drives etc, it worked differntly than any other I have encountered. After receiving a usb/host adapter cable, I plugged in a thumb drive and a SD card reader into the Arnova and was notified that the "Mass Storage Device" was disabled. I was then able to tranfer files and play videos directly from the usb device. I couldn't find any way to unmount the device so I just unplugged it; it complained but continued to work normally. There are no settings that need to be made nor are there any that I could find. Anybody want an adapter cable let me know and I will post a link.
Playing games is not my forte but I gave a couple a whirl and they seemed to work well. Angry Birds, the games exception, zoomed and played as smooth as silk.
My first impression is that this is a winner and will suit my needs very well. The screen size is a good compromise for watching videos, surfing, emailing and reading. For you ereaders; both CoolReader and Mantano work as expected. I will install the Kindle and Nook readers later but I don't expect any problems. Aldiko came pre-installed but I haven't tried it. Now is a good time to mention that It came with a minimum of bloat-ware.
The only down side, for me, is the weight. It weighs 17.3 ounces about three ounces more than the Fire. I'm getting used to it and it feels like a light weight next to the Thrive.
This may be one of the best buy out there! (176 USD incl ship)
Anybody have any question just let me know.
Regards - John
P.S. I forgot to mention that the 8G2 has 6 real control buttons on the face: Home, Search, Vol+, Vol-, Menu and Back. They click when pressed.