Picked up a Tecno DroidPad 8H yesterday after months of procrastination. No thanks to the almost non-existent hands on review of the tablet on the internet to guide my purchase decision. The seller eventually agreed to N31,500 after minutes of haggling. I thought it was a good bargain as I would have paid more than that on Jumia.

I intend the 8 incher to serve as a Phone (Yes, Phone) and something to read my pile of ebooks from.

The specs? No surprise there. Tecno squeezed a miserly 1GB RAM into it, a single SIM (not Dual SIM!), a generous 5100mAH battery, 16GB ROM and a quad core processor, all sweetened with Android Lollipop OS, 5.0

INITIAL SCARE
I try to make a habit of charging my gadgets before first use. That I did. But I was shocked when, one hour later, the battery level was still stuck at 65%! It hadn’t moved an inch! What?!

Okay, calm down. Perhaps, it’s something to do with the inverter? I switched over to the power generator, still no dice. By now, the battery level had even dropped to 63%.

Power from the grid was restored a few minutes later, and to my relief, I saw the battery level inch (albeit reluctantly) upwards till it reached 100% over an hour later.

This is not good.

Does it mean the tab can not be charged from the inverter or the power generator? Or has this got something to do with its unusual battery capacity of 5100mAH? Would need to investigate further on this.

EVEN MORE QUIRKS

1. Getting on the internet was a breeze via Wi-Fi. I have not gotten around to swiching my SIM card into the tab yet. Initial set up did not bug me with setting up my play store, so I did not bother. Instead I settled for side loading apps into it to save on bandwidth costs. App installation was soooo sloooooww!. Aaaargh! Tecno, what is this?!
2. Noticed the available system update. It brightened me up a bit. Perhaps a fix for the slow app installer? But alas, the system update failed – severally! I gave up.
3. A bunch of games came bundled with the tablet. I did not care much about the games, so i decided to uninstall. That went without event, until i noticed that gigabyte of space is still being tied down by the games data. Checked the OBB and DATA folders, empty! Where are these data stored? By the way, you have less than 10GB space to play with from the advertised 16GB.

(The full hands on review is next)