Don’t get me wrong, the iPad’s Retina display is pretty cool. Fitting a 2048 x 1536 resolution inside of a 10-inch display is fairly impressive, and I’d be incorrect if I said that it doesn’t look good. No Android tablet has come close to matching that yet. The Tegra 3-equipped Acer Iconia Tab A700 is about the closest an Android tablet has gotten, until now.
The Cube U9GT5, a Chinese Android tablet running Jelly Bean, has supposedly caught up with the iPad’s Retina display with a high-resolution display of its own. The U9GT5 sports a 9.7-inch screen with a 2048 x 1536 resolution, giving it the same 264 ppi that the iPad has.
Under that display you’ll find an ancient Rockhip RK3066 1.6 GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage. The display (and Jelly Bean) is really the only thing that this tablet has going for it. Most newer Android tablets from Asus, Samsung, and Acer could blow the U9GT5 straight out of the water.
While you may not have heard of Cube, they have actually been around the block before. They were actually the first manufacturer to release a tablet that ran off the Rockhip RK3066, which made it one of the first tablets to have a dual-core processor. However, we probably won’t see the U9GT5 hit any major stores. You’ll probably only find it on eBay and knock-off stores over in China.
[via SlashGear]
4:3 fail. Just go with 1080p on a quality screen. Forget about matching pixel density.
4:3 is far better than 16:9 if you do a lot of reading (which I do) – both for regular book/magazine layouts and especially for comic books. I refuse to buy into Apple’s ecosystem to get it though and there have been precious few Android tablets with this ratio so this looks like a winner to me. Small black bars above and below a video don’t bother me – it’s the content that matters.
By no means is the RK3066 ancient… you should check your facts before. In fact, by many many benchmarks (Quadrant f.e.) the RockChip is better than Tegra3. (And yes, to answer the other comments… 4:3 is better than 16:9)
I agree entirely that the RockChip is not as inferior as the writers of these articles would have you believe. At least on paper, this new Cube sounds like one of the best tablets you can buy, period. I’m keeping an eye on forums to hear from purchasers of this model to see if I want to buy one of these or not. And I don’t think that 4:3 is better than 16:9 if you just leave it at that. 4:3 can be better if you do a lot of reading and prefer to view websites in portrait mode. If entertainment and other media such as movies are the focus, 16:9 is the way to go. There’s a tool for every job, which is why there’s a market for both. I like that makers of Android devices are offering up both aspect ratios as options.
Really interesting product, this new Rockchip 3066 (not ancient, the other Cube tablet is 1 or two month old and other device with it are not older than one month) seems very interesting it’s able to decode QuadHD 2160p, as Allxwinner A10 does, but with more power in CPU and 4* more in GPU. So 1500+pixel display should be insane beautifull with QuadHD video :).
If any tablet I’ve seen is worthy of the “iPad killer” title that every new Android tablet that’s released seems to claim, this Cube would definitely comes the closest. Really, it’s main disadvantage is that it’s not marketed everywhere, so Cube gets the cold shoulder from bloggers and tech reviews. Spec-wise, the main area the Cube lags behind in is camera quality, which I don’t see as a big deal because I don’t see many people holding up their 10-inch tablet to take pictures very often.