Kurio Tablet 7s Reviews

The Kurio 7S is a tablet designed for families with children, and is designed accordingly. There’s a rubber bumper in the box should you need it, but the tablet on its own feels pretty tough. It’s heavy, has a huge bezel that makes the screen look smaller than it is, is thick and has a bright green soft touch plastic back. It’s plastic all the way, but is impressively robust.

The software is pretty locked down but the hardware has surprising scope for expansion, with HDMI, micro SD and USB ports all sat on the right-hand side. The power button is located on the top-right corner of the tablet – it is designed to be used almost exclusively in landscape mode – and there are stereo speakers either side too. The screen is a low-res 1024 x 600 pixels and though it pales in comparison to the higher res offerings in our test it is still better than you might expect. Our main complaint with the screen was its grippiness. It simply wasn’t possible to swipe a fi nger along the screen smoothly.

The tablet runs Android 4.2.2. It launched without Play store access, but an update during testing introduced this and made the device altogether more functional. The look of the tablet interface is unusual, being pure stock Android with a family-friendly setup process and apps. The tablet encourages you to create accounts for each user when you fi rst turn it on, and the parental controls are excellent. There are loads of kid-focused apps pre-installed, ranging from Angry Birds to more obscure offerings, but they can all be uninstalled if you don’t want them. It may take some time. And amid the hand-holding UI you still have the hardcore Android features too.

Performance is only so-so. While the processor was not laggy it wasn’t fast either. The 1GB of RAM was enough for most tasks you would perform on the device. High end gaming is out of the question, but for casual games, browsing and video viewing it serves its purpose.