At first we would like to thank iconBIT for offering a sample of their NetTAB THOR QUAD FHD NT-1005T tablet for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About iconBIT:

"iconBIT team is focused on multimedia solutions for content recording, storage, editing and playback: music, photo and video... Our ultimate idea is to integrate effective and easy way an "digital lifestyle" environment around modern open platforms and hardware components. At home, on the road, or while working -- iconBIT didn't push You towards one exact product, but ensures freedom of selection among best possible technologies and solutions, at best price/performance/feature value."

Product Features:

 

10,1” IPS display (1920x1200)

Powerful Quad Core CPU ARM Cortex-A9 (1.6 GHz)

Fast Quad Core GPU (Mali-400)

Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)

2 GB DDR3, 16 GB NAND Flash (up to 32 GB microSD)

Full HD and OTG support

G-sensor, Bluetooth

Battery capacity 7200 mAh

 

Technical Specifications:

 

 

IconBIT have sent us recently another interesting tablet with a 1920x1200 display, a 10.1 inch screen and a quad-core processor at 1.6GHz (we will go in more detail further in the review); the packaging is familiar to us and presents a photo of the actual product along with some icons which show the supported technologies:

 

 

 

 

On the back side of the box we will receive more technical specifications along with a short product description and also a drawing with the tablets’ ports and buttons:

 

 

 

The top layer holds the tablet, which is wrapped inside a semi-transparent plastic bag:

 

 

 

The bottom layer includes the bundle, which is quite plenty compared to the latest low-end offering from them:

 

 

 

We will get an USB cable, the power adapter, a set of earphones but also an USB OTG cable:

 

 

 

The power adapter is rated on the output as 12V, 2000mA:

 

 

 

 

An accessory which we did not find on many tablets is this white leatherette case, which is very useful and handy when we want to preserve the product in top shape for longer periods of time:

 

 

 

The interior of the case is soft and pleasant to the touch:

 

 

 

On the back side we will be able to see the cutout for the camera:

 

 

 

The tablet is also supplied with a Quick Start Guide in multiple languages:

 

 

 

 

The Thor Quad FHD tablet comes in a white version and has on the screen a pre-applied plastic film, to avoid scratches during transport; we would recommend keeping the film on until we find a suitable compatible replacement:

 

 

 

In the front we have a 0.3MP camera for Skype or other type of video conferences:

 

 

 

In the corner we will also locate a sensor for backlight adjustment:

 

 

 

All connectors and ports of this tablet are located on only one side, but let’s look in more detail:

 

 

 

The tablet comes with a metallic frame so it feels quite sturdy; on it we have the DC-IN jack, USB connector, the SD Card slot, HDMI:

 

 

 

Further to the right we have a headphone jack along with the external microphone port:

 

 

 

Next we will find the Volume rocker along with the Power On/Off/Standby button:

 

 

 

The port/button descriptions can be found on the bottom cover of the tablet:

 

 

 

In the vicinity we will find a 5MP camera sensor, this time with flash LED:

 

 

 

Also on the back cover we will be able to find the product model number, power rating and a serial number:

 

 

 

The opposite side with the button resides the speaker port:

 

 

 

Once the tablet has been powered on, the Full-HD screen looks sharp and is easy to read:

 

 

 

The tablet can be inserted into the case with ease and it does not make the use of the interfaces difficult:

 

 

 

The speaker port has a special cutout:

 

 

 

On the opposite side we can see the rest of the ports:

 

 

 

On the back, the cutout for the camera with LED flash is almost perfect:

 

 

 

 

 

Viewing Angles

 

Thanks to the IPS matrix with 224ppi and 1920x1200 resolution, the screen viewing angles should not pose a problem to anyone. Here are some example shots:

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the tablet has completed the boot-up procedure, we will be directed to the desktop, which holds the default wallpaper, but also some application icons which are brought here from the drawer:

 

 

By opening up the drawer, we will find out which other applications are installed with the stock firmware, and here we will get to see some games, office applications, electronic book readers and so on:

 

 

One of the free applications is Adobe Reader, very handy when we need to read PDF documents:

 

 

The tablet also comes with an ApkInstaller app, which is meant to help us with the installation of new applications which we have downloaded over the web, without the use of Google Play Store:

 

 

Google Drive is also preinstalled and with it we can manage our files “in the cloud”:

 

 

EBookDroid is familiar to us since we have also found it with the NT-1006T tablet review:

 

 

ES File Explorer 3 is also included, which makes file browsing an easy job, offline and also online:

 

 

A native Rockchip file manager is also present but it is not as ergonomic as ES File Explorer:

 

 

Next we can find IMDB preinstalled for checking out the latest movies, trailers and so on:

 

 

Kingsoft Office is also present as it was on the Thor MX, which lets us browse through standard Office files:

 

 

Google Maps is known by most of us and helps with directions all over the world:

 

 

Moon+ Reader is again, another application we have discussed about previously and it is practically another ebook reader as the previous EBookDroid:

 

 

MX Player supports video hardware acceleration for providing smooth playback:

 

 

Google Translate has evolved a lot and now we can translate besides an entered text also writings from photos or voice:

 

 

Yahoo Weather can be configured in order to show the forecast in the area we choose:

 

 

The Youtube app is also preinstalled for accessing our videos easier, if we do not want to use a regular browser:

 

 

The Zedge app will help us choose from a ton of wallpapers, live wallpapers, ringtones and more in order to customize our tablet:

 

With the Settings tab we will go in more detail, as we have done with each Android device so far. The Wi-Fi section shows the currently detected networks and prompts for the keys if encrypted; here we will be also able to choose when the Wi-Fi network should be active (always, during standby only when the tablet is charging or off during standby). Despite the fact that we have set the option on “Always”, the tablet was still switching off the Wi-Fi on standby:

 

 

The Bluetooth function can be enabled in order to connect compatible devices:

 

 

The Data usage menu shows us the traffic used per each application:

 

 

Some extra options are also found inside the “More” section:

 

 

The Sound menu offers us the possibility to adjust the volume, change the default system notification, enable touch sounds along with the screen lock sound:

 

 

Next we have the Display section which allows modifying the screen brightness, wallpaper, sleep timer but also the font size:

 

 

The HDMI menu takes care of the integrated output options. Here we can adjust the screen resolution, Zoom but also timeout:

 

 

Here is the list of supported resolutions:

 

 

The screenshot menu is new to us and seems to be present on the latest Rockchip platforms; from here we can set a screen capture delay, the location of the screenshot storage or show/hide the screenshot button in the status bar:

 

 

Storage section shows us the status of the free/occupied NAND Flash:

 

 

From the Battery menu we will be able to see if there are any applications draining up the battery and also what is the uptime from a single charge:

 

 

The Apps section can show the applications which are installed on the SD Card, the currently running ones, but also a list of all applications which are installed on the platform:

 

 

The next menu allows us to enable Google’s location service:

 

 

The Security menu comes with the usual options we have seen on other platforms:

 

 

The Language and input menu will allow us to specify a language for the interface, change the default software keyboard with a replacement and more:

 

 

The Backup and Reset menu will allow to save our settings in the cloud, but also a perform a factory data reset, which will boot our tablet into recovery in order to perform the erase:

 

 

The Date & time menu is pretty self-explanatory; as we have seen the tablet was unable to set the time zone automatically so we had to set it manually. This issue is not isolated to this particular product, but we have found it with many other Android devices tested in the past:

 

 

From the Accessibility menu we will be able to set some other options like Large text, Auto rotate, Text-to-speech output and so on:

 

 

The Developer options menu contains miscellaneous options which can affect the functionality of the tablet:

 

 

The About tablet menu comes with two options for performing system updates (which are not too useful since we have seen that iconBIT does not perform OTA updates), along with the Status section, model number, Android version, Kernel version, Build number and Hardware number:

 

 

The iconBIT NetTAB Thor Quad FHD tablet is equipped with a Rockchip RK3188 CPU at 1.6GHz on 28nm manufacturing process while the GPU is Mali-400 MP4 (quad core) at 533MHz. This tablet also comes with 2GB of installed memory:

 

 

The System tab will supply us more information regarding the board type, Android version, kernel, resolution, free memory and so on:

 

 

The Battery tab will show the current status; it seems that the temperature sensor is not present:

 

 

To test out the performances of the NetTAB Thor Quad FHD tablet, we have installed some freeware benchmark apps from the Internet in the internal memory (did not transfer them to the Sdcard). Afterwards, the applications were ran one-by-one, and we recorded the final results; the obtained scores were also compared with the previously tested systems, to spot the performance differences.

 

AnTuTu

 

 

Basemark GUI

 

 

Passmark PerformanceTest

 

 

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt

 

 

Nenamark 2

 

 

Vellamo

 

 

Epic Citadel

 

 

Real Pi

 

 

Time to draw up the conclusions for the Thor Quad FHD tablet from iconBIT; we can say from the beginning that the RK3188 CPU clocked at 1.6GHz (along with the 2GB of installed RAM) really makes the tablet feel snappy, the only annoying slowdown being when installing applications within Google Play Store: the tablet simply freezes for a couple of settings just after the application is downloaded and the installation procedure is started.

 

The tablet is shipped with an earlier version of Android (4.1.1) and we could see quite a few number of applications preinstalled onto the system. We would have preferred the system without them since most are downloadable for free from the Play Store and this would free up quite a bit of space. Removing apps which have been included in the firmware version is not very handy for the average user (you cannot simply keep the icon pressed until the delete icon appears), but we have to root the tablet (this one does not come pre-rooted) and use an additional application like Root Explorer in order to enable write permissions to the system partition. Rooting is indeed possible for this tablet and seems to work fine.

 

The body of the tablet seems quite sturdy, but there is a drawback regarding the Wi-Fi signal, because of the included aluminum frame. We have done some tests and seen that we were getting about 65% signal 1m away the wireless router so figured out that something was wrong; some other people got the same issue so this is not an isolated problem with our sample.

 

This time we are dealing with a 5MP camera with flash in the back of the unit so it is quite an improvement compared to the previously reviewed Android tablets.

 

The Mali-400 MP4 quad-core GPU is quite decent and was more likely aimed at 720P tablets; the performance at 1920x1200 resolution is acceptable, since we were able to play games like Carmageddon, Angry Birds Star Wars II, Temple Run II without a hitch. However, more intensive graphics games like Real Racing 3 seem to run at a lower framerate than expected.

 

The battery lasts quite a lot since the Wi-Fi function switches off each time the tablet goes in standby mode:

 

 

The improved bundle from iconBIT is very welcome, especially the free leatherette case which matches the tablet color. It is known that we barely find on the market cases for tablets from brands that are not as established as Samsung, Sony, Apple and it saves us a lot of hassle. What was not included with a tablet is the protective screen so we would need to search for something close compatible.

 

The Thor Quad FHD tablet can be found online for about 278 Euros.

iconBIT NetTAB THOR QUAD FHD NT-1005T Tablet is Recommended For:

 

We would like to thank again to iconBIT for making this review possible!