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Android tablets have fallen out of fashion slightly in recent years, certainly in the high-end market where these is only really Samsung actively developing them and to a lesser extent ASUS and Lenovo. Even Google has gone suspiciously quiet about updating their ageing Pixel C.

However, the low to middle end of the market still has a lot of development, Tablets in this category are good for family homes and allow people to consume media wherever they are without hogging a room or TV.

Hannspree are one such company, they currently have 2 tablets that are popular on various sites, the 11.6” Poseidon and the massive (for a tablet) Titan 13.3”. Both these are quite large for tablets so help differentiate Hannspree from other brands on the market.

I was sent a sample of the Hannspree HANNSpad Poseidon 11.6” which retails for around £160 and its basic specifications include:

  • 11.6” IPS LED Backlight Panel – 1366×768
  • CPU Quad Core MT8163 64 bit
  • ARM Cortex A53
  • 2GB RAM Memory
  • 16GB Internal Storage
  • OS Android 6 (Marshmallow)
  • Dual Band Wi-Fi: IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n 2.4 / 5GHz
  • Dual Camera 2Mp / 2Mp
  • Bluetooth 4.0 LE
  • GPS

This thing is pretty big for tablets, the last one I used regularly was the Nexus 7, my Girlfriend uses the iPad Mini. It dwarves both of these. Due to its relatively low cost, there has not been much effort making it thin either. There is no fancy aluminium body. The main case is all a rubberized plastic. Personally, I am not fussed about super slim aluminium bodies. I don’t think this is designed to be carried around in the streets, but more for home use.

The plastic body also has very plasticky buttons for volume and power. Overall it doesn’t have the best feel for build quality, but it is not terrible. There is also an easy to access MicroSD slot which will no doubt be very useful for increasing the 16GB of onboard storage.

Loading up the device you boot straight into the Android desktop, which is unusual compared to phones where you go through a setup process.

The first thing I noticed, and it was the main thing I noticed in the specs sheet, is the low resolution of the screen at 1366×768. I guess we are spoilt with the ridiculous resolutions of phones, but it would have been great to see an FHD screen on a tablet of this size. However, when I looked around the internet, pretty much no other brand was doing FHD within this price range. You need to be spending around £300 to get a better resolution.

The screen quality itself seems to be decent enough. Some colours, especially with on-screen icons, look a little washed out, but I think this is a resolution issue. Overall it is good and there are no major issues during media playback.

As usual with most of my Android devices I quickly loaded Nova launcher, and due to the screen size, I increased the desktop grid size and reduced the icon size. This gave me much more usable space and faked a higher resolution in terms of screen real estate.

The Poseidon comes with Android 6.0 installed, which you might think is very out of data for a tablet, but unless you are buying the latest and greatest from Samsung you will be lucky to get Android 6.0. A ridiculous number of tablets are still running Android 5.1 with quite a few still shipping with Android 4.4.2 KitKat.

The 2GB of Ram and MediaTek MT8163 SOC are far from cutting edge, I found basic day to day use to be perfectly fine. I can browse Reddit, Facebook and use chrome fine. I had no issues streaming with Netflix, Amazon Video or Spotify. Which, at the end of the day, this is what this tablet is designed for (in my opinion). You will also find the MediaTek SoC in amazons latest Fire HD 8″, so it is clearly designed to be able to handle media well.

Due to the size of the tablet, you get a nice chunky 6.000 mAh Li-Ion Battery, combined with the mid-range SoC and 768p screen you should get plenty of screen on time with this. I easily lasted over a day of heavy media use.

There is also pretty much no bloatware on this device which is always very welcome. There are no fancy skins applied like Touchwiz. From what I can tell there are just a couple of system test apps and almost no branding at all.

Overall, this is a surprisingly decent tablet. I was quite sceptical at first with the build quality and low-resolution screen, but I had no issues with either of these during use at all. There is no other device out there that has a significantly better specification for a similar price either, so any issues I do have with it are not relevant based on its price category.

If you are looking for a large format tablet to watch media and browse the internet on at home then the Hannspree Poseidon is a solid choice for £164.59 on Amazon.

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