Me Mobile Prime 8 Quick Review

A new player in the local market with a very familiar looking tablet. Nope, this is not an iPad Mini, but it is the Me Prime 8 tablet.

I’ve been seeing a lot of iPad Mini clones and this tablet joins the bandwagon in terms of build material and size. It might turn off some consumers but you really can’t deny the good feeling of a cold metal on your hand. It feels solid and tough.

At 7.85″, screen size is also identical to the popular Apple product. Well, the similarities end there. Let’s see now what makes this Me Prime 8 tablet a product of its own. Starting with the hardware.

As already mentioned, the tablet is enclosed in an aluminum body. Paired with a glass front, it is certainly a stunner. What holds it back is the plastic volume rocker and the tiny power/lock button that are all situated on top. Making them hard to reach, especially the volume rocker. Both sides are clean by the way.

The bottom part is probably the busiest of all. By just even looking at them, it screams a lot of work. Here we can find the 3.5mm headphone jack, the DC-in charging port (surprisingly present), the micro-USB port for data transfer and charging, mini-HDMI port, microSD TF-Card slot, and the microphone hole.

Prime 8’s IPS LCD display boasts 1024×768 pixels which results to around 160ppi. It’s size and density will be fine for casual web browsing and social networking, nothing fancy. Good thing they use an IPS panel so viewing angles are good and you won’t have any trouble sharing what is on display. Something tablets should have!

As for the camera, the 2MP rear fixed-focus optic won’t get your far. Also the VGA (0.3MP) front-facing camera is only good for video-calling. Good thing they’re there just in case. The Prime 8 is better off as a multimedia device since in can handle up to 1080p playback without a hiccup and there is HDMI-out when you want to connect it to your big screen.

Performance wise, this tablet will get the job done. It runs on Android 4.2.2 with no overlying skin. A quad-core processor paired with a gigabyte of RAM ensures smooth UI navigation. Though intense graphic games like Dead Trigger 2 can cause it to drop a few frames. Nevertheless, it is still playable and maybe wishing it to handle such processing power is an overkill.

Benchmark results:
Nenamark 2 – 54.8fps
Antutu 4 – 11909
Vellamo HTML 5 – 1146
Vellamo Metal – 356

In the end, Me Prime 8 is a good companion. It also comes in a wide range of colors. Our review unit features a Black touch panel with Brown back casing. While there are Baby Blue, Baby Pink, and Yellow back panel for the White touch panel. For Php6,995USD 119INR 10,105EUR 114CNY 868, it can be a fine option to fit your budget but keep your eyes open for better deals.

Me Mobile Prime 8 Tablet specs:
7.85″ 1024×768 IPS LCD
1.0 GHz quad-core Allwinner A31S, ARM Cortex-A7 CPU
PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU
1GB RAM
16GB internal storage, expandable up to 32GB via microSD
2MP rear-facing camera
0.3MP front-facing camera
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
3800mAh battery
Android 4.2 Jellybean

What we liked about it:
– Premium build
– IPS display panel
– Comes with an OTG cable out of the box
– Relatively spacious internal memory

What we did not like:
– Display can be brighter
– Too much port labels
– Feeble speaker
– Lacks bluetooth