Onda V818 Mini borrows iPad mini’s size and design, goes for half its price

Onda-V818-mini

Looking for an Android-based iPad mini lookalike with a little more pizazz than the GooPad mini clone? Meet the Onda V818 Mini. This is not a clone per se, but it does steal borrow iPad mini’s overall design and display size. All while keeping the price uber-low.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start from the beginning. Who the fudge is Onda? To be frank, we never heard of the company before December 2012. And the most relevant Google search results for the OEM’s name send us to a Portuguese sportswear brand.

Only this Onda is not Portuguese and it doesn’t sell sneakers. Instead, the company is based in China and does what nearly everyone does in Shanzhai Land, only with a little bit of extra style. In other words, you can’t really expect reliability from its gadgets, but you might just be surprised.

And now let’s sink our teeth in Onda V818 Mini’s specs. The 7.9-inch IPS display is no Retina unit, but it’s not that bad either, boasting a 1,024 x 768 pixels resolution. The Allwinner A31S quad-core processor is fairly average too, being based on the juice-saving ARM Cortex-A7 architecture and having a PowerVR SGX 544 GPU as a sidekick.

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No major selling point so far, but how about 2 GB of RAM as a starter? The 5 MP rear-facing camera sounds pretty awesome too, while the 16 GB of on-board storage can be expanded via microSD. And what can we say about the on-board Android 4.1 Jelly Bean other than it’s just perfect?

There’s even a front-facing 0.3 MP camera on the thing, but no Bluetooth or GPS. As for the battery, one of Onda’s websites is listing it at 4,500 mAh, while another says it’s a 5,000 mAh unit. Even if the former will prove legitimate, that’s still pretty nice, given Google’s Nexus 7 for instance only packs a 4,325 mAh battery while having a higher-res display and a more power-demanding CPU.

The absolute kicker is obviously V818 Mini’s price point – $170. That’s less than the N7 and half of what the iPad mini goes for. Onda doesn’t have the tab in stock at the time being, but it estimates it’s going to be able to kick shipping into gear “sometime in April”. Any takers? Come on, at least to play some pranks on unsuspecting Apple fanboys!

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By | 2013-03-22T15:00:04+00:00 March 22nd, 2013|Android Related, Just the Tablets|0 Comments

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