ainol novo7 aurora
For the price it is great value. The combination of 1024x600 screen, 1GB RAM and ICS makes for a quite useful tablet although you do need to be prepared to invest a little effort in configuring it to get the best out of it. The IPS screen means you get a wide viewing angle(same with onda vi40), the HDMI port means you can connect it up to a TV to show pictures, movies or whatever else you want, the Micro SD socket means you can add extra memory for more media files. The front facing camera is only 2 MPixels but it is more than adequate as a webcam (although the mirror image pictures are a slight downside). The USB port is a proper powered USB OTG port so can be used to plug in a keyboard if desired unlike some other tablets. Ainol Novo 7 Aurora also included a UK converter for the charger plug although that may depend on the supplier.
I've found the WiFi performance pretty good but I've only tried 11g - some users have been complaining about performance on 11n but I don't know if they are comparing a dual antenna laptop to a single antenna tablet which is bound to be worse.
The battery lasts for around 3 days of light use and only takes a few hours to charge when using the supplied 2A charger. It will charge over USB but is slow to do so.
Once all the Google add ons are installed I found voice search pretty impressive - I'm not used to speech recognition consistently listing what I actually said as the first suggestion.
Now on to the downsides
As noted in the previous review the stock browser can be a bit struttery. I've switched to using the Dolphin browser which doesn't seem to suffer from this. This has made iPlayer usable on it.
There are obviously a number of things missing from a tablet at this price point. No Bluetooth (but many of the things you might use Bluetooth for can be connected by USB), no GPS, no compass, only a low resolution accelerometer, only a mono speaker (and it is positioned on the back where it is easy to block), single core CPU (there are rumours Ainol are working on a dual core Aurora 2), it doesn't have the toughened oil resistant screen of a high end tablet, although it is set up to use Google Play Store it isn't a "Google experience" device so it isn't easy to install all the standard Google apps like Talk, Maps and YouTube. That also means it doesn't come with face unlock enabled and I haven't yet tried to enable that.
It does come with root access though which makes it possible to fix many of the irritating issues with the device as shipped (although it is a simple unprotected root access, installing the SuperUser app from the Market to control which apps run as root is a good idea). The slatedroid web site mentioned in the other review seems to be a good source for tips on how to do some of these fixes.
If you want to get rid of all of the chinese apps then you can do so once you are root although take a backup first in case you make a mistake, I accidentally deleted the preinstalled Fruit Ninja as it is presumably a Chinese version called ShuiGuoFenZhe.apk and had to restore it. (It also comes with Angry Birds Rio pre installed).
Getting the dictionary working took quite a bit of searching but this turns out to be a difference between open source android and Google android. To fix it you need to find a suitable replacement LatinIME.apk which a little Google searching should turn up.
The issue with Skype mentioned in another review appears to be a widespread problem with the current Market version of Skype on other tablets and the fix listed there is widely recommended.
There is some confusion over the CPU speed of the device, the AllWinner A10 SoC that the device uses is supposedly capable of either 1.5 or 1.2Ghz depending on where you read but in this tablet it is underclocked to 1GHz, possibly because the heatsinking isn't sufficient to make it reliable at higher speeds.
In common with many ICS devices it doesn't have a trackpad / dpad. This is mildly irritating but as it is a widespread problem affected apps are generally being modified.
The touch screen doesn't seem amazingly accurate and it is occasionally hard to select things that are close to the edge of the screen.
