it's been a long time since we've done an unboxing in the cameraman's office as
you can see it's kind of gone to ruin in
the time that I haven't been here to uh to help him clear space from time to
time got old game controllers not that the cameraman has any idea how to play a
game being a Mac guy and all that okay
cameraman we're doing some cleanup he's got his precious money all over the
place so i' wonder you has any money he spends so much on making sure that he
has a Mac instead of getting a PC which is a better
value okay so today we have something totally unrelated to Mac or PC this is
actually an Android tablet this is the cruise tablet from velocity micro and it
looks pretty cool so first things first
we got a sticker on the front Kindle for Android so you can read more than
725,000 Kindle books with free applications with the free applications
on the cruise tablet if you are a non Us customer book availability may vary so
that might be relevant to me given I am here in the great white north of Canada
all right let's see what they have to say for themselves on the box so you can
view your cruise tablet at the right angle with the cruise stand so there's a
stand Dimensions you got the compatible products there's a little stand okay I
don't know that it comes with that I guess we'll find out here on the back
little thing all the applications you need in the palm of your hand and here's
our specs so it has a 7 in uh slim TFT
so that b basically just means LCD screen 800x 600 capacitive touch it is a
4:3 aspect ratio so that's interesting this is not widescreen it runs off
Android 2.0 has a browser okay 256 Megs
of RAM 4 gigs of built-in storage with a 4 gig external SD card but you can
expand that it comes with Wi-Fi it has a g sensor battery is up to 6 hours of
watching video we've got Dimensions here but we're going to pull it out and show you guys later it has support for SDHC
so you can support up to I believe it's 32 gigs on SDHC video playback is here
reader files stand oh the stand is included there you go here's all a few
different things that you can do surf the web use the online bookstore you can
access your social media really it's app driven much like uh any Android device
you can watch videos view documents it has a dictionary I don't know why they
would necessarily call it the dictionary but whatever manage your files and it
has a g sensor so it will automatically rotate from portrait to
landscape more features here which we've
pretty much cover most of those also includes an alarm clock apparently a
calculator I mean it better include a calculator you know this kind of a price
point and this Advanced device okay so
packaging wise here we go we have a white box which has more of a white box on the
inside there's the tablet itself I'm not going to show you that just yet here is
a nice little uh okay there's our included 4 gig SanDisk SDHC
card here is a little sleeve which
includes some information about the warranty so there's our SD card here's
the limited warranty okay something about one year okay so it has a 1ear
warranty next we've got a quick start guide why don't we have a look at that
after we turn it on and then we have a little uh little sort of foamy sleeve
for it so that's pretty nice actually all right here's the little Cruise stand
so you can use it at the correct angle all right and then we have a charger so
that's it fairly simple accessory package let's have a look at the cruise
tablet
itself it's got a little bit of a heft to it but it's more of a um it's more of
a feels solid weight than a feels heavy
weight kind of like the iPhone 4 like the iPhone 4 is heavy but it's just
heavy cuz it's like feels solidly built so I'm going to go ahead and try and
find the power button which is here so
let's uh let's wait for it to power on while we show you guys all the buttons so we've got reset check it out USB
that's something your iPhone doesn't have okay there's our SD slot so that's
your expandable storage up to 32 gigs on this side we've got volume controls up
and down we've got a little bit of cruise branding going on there moving
along to the bottom we've got a headphone jack uh some kind of indicator
LED we have speakers which are built right into the bottom here as well as
our power in and then on the other side nothing so it's got a fairly clean
overall look to the outside of it on the back you just see a little velocity
micro logo Cruise tablet you got your serial number as well as some FCC you
know it complies with part whatever of whatever um here we've got Android
booting up now and why don't we wait for it to boot
up and then we'll be back and yeah it's not quite booted up
yet oh it's booted up cameraman's gesturing to me so I guess we better do
that oh look there we go so the screen is right away nice and vibrant I'm going
to see if I can find some uh I think here is settings yeah so let's play
around with some of the stuff so we've got Wireless and networks works pretty
much like any other Android device so we've got our navigation up here move it
down a little bit there we go uh so let's see I want screen is a big one for
me so let's see what the display is going to look like if we uh Tinker
around with a little bit so brightness it's at its maximum brightness right now
it goes all the way down to here so I'd say sort of a happy medium is probably
right there around 35 to uh 40% that's
where I usually end up when I'm using any of these kinds of devices this one
seems to have a full charge on it right
now uh we can show animations cool so
does that yeah there we go so now the uh now the screens are going to be
animating uh you know what give me a second to get connected to the Wi-Fi and
then we'll go a little further into this so here we go we got the Android
app store installed it actually didn't come with that pre-installed on the
tablet which is a very strange thing to me but here it is so I just downloaded
Angry Birds uh connecting to the Wi-Fi only took me a couple minutes which is
pretty cool um just had to enter the password for the Wi-Fi here at the
office using the App Store is pretty much like using the App Store on my
friend's phone uh back when I was deciding whether to get um here let me
see where's like uh here why don't me see if there's like a Facebook app or
something uh back when I was deciding whether to get uh the Galaxy S Vibrant
or the iPhone 4 um although the cameraman did bring my
attention to the fact that Android 2.0 what this guy's running is not really
that similar to the uh to the Android
that is running on the phones that are out there right now it's slightly more
up toate so this is what there is for Facebook why don't we just have a look
and see if our Angry Birds is done not just yet so let's uh you know okay I
I have to criticize a couple things it's not as fast as I would ideally like um
it's not quite as U the screen's not
quite as bright as I would ideally like but it's got a lot going for it and that
is that the price is really low so this thing is less than 250 bucks at retail
it does have the agreement in place with Amazon where you can use it as a Kindle
ebook reader so that makes it it puts it down in that ebook price point where it
becomes very a very good value proposition um and you don't really need
the speed for those kinds of applications so here you can just sign
in with your Amazon um credentials okay
so why don't we go ahead and uh check out Angry Birds here see how well that
runs on this little tablet of course that's what I would
care about right do I want to install this application yep okay we'll come
back once it's installed okay we weren't able to
install Angry Birds what I've discovered is that that app store is not actually
like the Android Market that I'm familiar with so it doesn't have some of
the same good stuff in it uh we did find a YouTube app though in the in the
cruise App Store and there's also a Facebook one in there so let's see how
well the YouTube one works I'm just running one of my own YouTube videos
this is a 720p video yes it is highend
and I mean very highend
gra okay let's see if there's a way to run this in higher quality I'll be back
in a minute so we were watching it in horrible
quality uh why don't we watch in normal quality that might help a little bit ah
yes it is highend and I mean very
highend Graphics unboxing
time this is the rad HD
6990 it features I don't really see anywhere to adjust the volume
ony okay details comments oh oh I can
rate my video check this out 4 gigs of gddr5
memory yes okay G well I think that
they're probably focusing on the correct marketing points on the box when they
emphasize it as like a Kindle reader because with the overall build of it
feeling very solid very nice and the uh
the screen being quite adequate I think that it would make for like a great
eBook reader and since there you can access the internet on it and we'll show
you the browsing speed in just a moment here here let's try this one more time
watch a normal quality let's see if it gets any
better that it's probably buffering right
now okay let's show you guys the browser
so we're going to go to nci.com
okay press home okay we got a
browser NCI
x.com let's go
there oops okay let's try that again NCI
ix.com go let's try that go button that
might work better so here's where we downloaded the
YouTube v1.3 cuz you can see it's not a you it's not like an Android YouTube app
it's like specifically for the cruise reader so I think they probably still
got some work to do as far as the app development goes and um and once once
those mature a little bit once the installed base of these uh devices gets
a little bit wider then I think we'll see some definite improvements in the
overall um in the overall responsiveness
of the
apps here we go so we're loading up the NCIX site uh oh you can double tap to
zoom in and zoom out so that's kind of neat
I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to check out the forums you can see we've
got St Patrick's deals going on on nci.com right
now so we've moved significantly closer to our access point and we're actually
having a little bit more success with the uh browsing
speed okay so let's go to uh you know
the main forum uh
home so basically I think the conclusion at this point is that as an e-reader or
for checking email um actually this is
pretty unbeatable for the price but I wouldn't expect to be doing any heavy
lifting let's see if we can get it to browse a
little bit faster now because I I did have some success with faster browsing
so here we go now we can navigate so I'm quite close to my access point from here
and uh that's giving me some more success although it's still not fast by
any stretch of the imagination for mobile browsing but I mean it's more
than adequate for like uh email or whatever the case may be so thank you
for checking out this video on the velocity micro Cruise tablet don't
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