EFUN Nextbook Next5 Review

Review Summary:

The Next5 is a budget Android tablet that performs like a budget device. Don't expect much and you won't be disappointed.

Pros

• Sleek, attractive design
• Good external speakers
• Decent battery life

Cons

• Unresponsive resistive touchscreen
• Incredibly heavy for its size
• eBook software not compatible with Borders/Kobo downloads

EFUN Nextbook Next5 Full Review

 

The EFUN Nextbook Next5 spec sheet reads like the answer to every frugal, would-be tablet owner's dreams. The fact that with a $200 launch price, it costs less than most tablets, and sports dimensions conveniently smaller than other devices, make it appear to be the perfect hybrid between tablet and smartphone. As far as looks go, the Next5 is a slick device. But as everyone knows, sometimes looks can be deceiving.

BUILD & DESIGN

I really do mean it, no sarcasm intended – the Nextbook Next5 tablet is great looking. With a glossy black finish and three simple, straightforward navigation buttons that mirror those you'll find on the face of most standard Android devices – a Home button, a Menu button, and a Back button – it's as effective a statement about the beauty of economy and minimalism as any other tablet twice its price. And then you go to pick it up, and your opinion of the Next5 takes an immediate nosedive.

Not that it looks like it would be particularly lightweight to begin with, but you don't expect to get physical exercise out of it either. The tablet is a disproportionate half-inch thick, but even then its weight takes you by surprise. This sucker's a whopping 2.5 pounds, which is almost double the weight of the iPad, ASUS Transformer, and Motorola Xoom, all of which cost more than twice the price of the Next5. I get it: sometimes you make concessions in order to save money, but tell that to your hands and wrists after about an hour of trying to hold the Next5 like a paperback.

DisplayThe Next5's 7-inch TFT LCD touchscreen looks great, projecting a full color 800 x 600 pixel resolution that makes watching HD videos from YouTube or directly from the tablet's 2GB of onboard storage a nifty experience. For the record, the 7-inch measurement is only accurate if you bust out your measuring tape and measure diagonally from corner to corner – the tablet's actual screen size is 3.5 x 6 inches which isn't too shabby.

With an overall tablet width of almost five full inches, the tablet's designers could've gotten away with stretching the dimensions of the display by about another half inch in each direction without ticking too many people off. There's plenty of unused space between the outer edges of the display and the tip of the device itself to have allowed for this, but maybe the folks in the design department were feeling considerate for those of us who like to grasp our tablets by the edges rather than cradling them in our laps. Maybe this wasn't a shortcoming after all, but a conscious decision to allow optimum grip given the device's weight. Either way, the Next5's display size isn't that big of a problem when compared with some of the other issues it's got going on.

PERFORMANCE

The way I've been going on, you were probably misled into thinking that the praise would just keep on coming for the Nextbook Next5. And it certainly would have if, for example, I'd have never pressed the ON button to check out the performance.

First of all, simply unlocking the device was an unbelievable pain. How many times have you ever actually laughed out loud from frustration at simply trying to slide your finger across the surface of an Android device to unlock it? It took me a good five or six tries to the point where I thought that there was something seriously wrong with the tablet. As it turns out, there wasn't. It's just that it has a resistive touchscreen like the Nintendo DS, so it simply responds far better to the use of a toothpick stylus (which, incidentally, comes included with the bonus leather case).

Fair enough – but I usually lose my enthusiasm for mobile devices the minute I'm told I have to utilize foreign objects in order to get them to work the way they ought to. Scrolling through lists or websites proved to be something of a joke thanks to the poorly responsive touchscreen. Even with the stylus, the occasional misfire had me using the aforementioned Back button more times than I'd anticipated I would.

The eBook ReaderThe Next5 comes with an eBook reader pre-loaded with 25 free public domainbooks, but if you're looking at this tablet as a replacement for your Kindle or your NOOK, my advice is to hang onto those dedicated eReaders. To shop around and download books on the Next5, you simply launch either of the two separate pre-loaded Borders or Kobo Bookstore applications.

The only thing is that books you download from here can't be synced with the tablet's built-in eBook reader, so right off the bat you're forced to use separate applications to do your reading. You can easily move a variety of different eBook formats (including PDF, EPUB, TXT, and RTF) to your eBook reader using the provided USB cable, but it's still a hassle to have to access an entirely different platform to read the stuff you've downloaded from Borders/Kobo. Worse yet, the Kobo application displayed an inclination to crash just about every single time I tried to access it, rendering the Next5 a total bust in its capacity to perform as an adequate standalone eBook reader – although the separate Borders library worked just fine.

In addition, there's no shortcut to allow you to toggle easily between font sizes while you're reading, and something as simple as turning to the next page requires getting used to. In order to page forward or backward, you have to slide your finger across the screen that results in a graphic that imitates the look of a page being turned. This is far better than the annoying flash that accompanies every single page turn on the Amazon Kindle, but you've got to remember one thing – the Next5 has an LCD screen, whereas the Kindle's got eInk.

The aPenThe fact that the Next5 comes with its very own protective leather case makes it an even better deal, dollar-wise. But once you flip it open, you're met with something of a disconcerting – if not confusing – sight: a stylus, a pen, and a notepad. We already know what the stylus is for, but what's with the pen? As it turns out, this is no ordinary ballpoint pen but a digital "aPen." If you're still confused, join the club – so was I, until I finally figured it out.

The tablet comes with a built-in iNote program that lets you take handwritten notes and save them to the tablet's memory, and forward them elsewhere or share them if you so desire. The truly odd thing about this gizmo is that it works by picking up the aPen's action on the provided notepad that rests right next to an ultrasound and infrared sensor when the tablet is placed inside the leather case. The whole point is that you can convert handwritten notes or drawings onto your tablet and you can even add handwritten doodles to existing image files. The only thing is, there are other tablets on the market that come with the ability to write directly on the screen with a stylus, making the Next5 look like a relic of the past straight out of the box.

For the record, there's nothing particularly innovative about the aPen, which seems like more of a gimmick than anything else. It works well at recreating your exact pen strokes and even gives you the option to set brush color and width, but apart from that, I was relatively unimpressed.

Battery LifeThe Nextbook's battery life is decent, providing about seven hours of solid music playback before requiring a recharge, and six hours of web surfing or video watching. If all you're doing is fiddling around or catching up on your reading, you might even get a full ten hours of use. The given battery recharge time is five hours, but it didn't take me that long to build up a full charge.

Other Features

The Next5 doesn't come with the Google App Market, but instead offers the SlideMe 4.0 application marketplace, which has apps, but nothing of particular note.

• Built-in operating system Android OS 2.1
• 2GB hard drive with expandable SD card slot
• Online video watching is made simple through a pre-installed YouTube application
• Media player for video and audio, as well as the image viewer, are all simple, straightforward, and intuitive
• HDMI interface lets you connect the Next5 to an HD TV

CONCLUSION

I really wanted to like the Next5, and on first inspection things looked promising. I was even willing to look past issues of excessive weight to focus purely on what the Next5 had to offer deep down inside, but in the end it simply wasn't meant to be. There is just too much "budget" to this budget Android tablet.

In the end, I consider it a minor miracle that I didn't end up throwing the Next5 across the room in pure frustration when I found myself grappling with the touchscreen's lousy performance. My final verdict: if you don't mind using a stylus to navigate your Android device or you have particularly long fingernails, you might enjoy this creation. But if you're expecting it to perform at least something like the other more expensive tablets you've seen, guess again.

Pros Sleek, attractive design Good external speakers Decent battery life

Cons Unresponsive resistive touchscreen Incredibly heavy for its size eBook software not compatible with Borders/Kobo downloads