My Blog On Technology: eFun Nextbook Premium 9 tablet hands-on (video)

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

eFun Nextbook Premium 9 tablet hands-on (video)

It seems like only yesterday that eFun was talking up its Nextbook Premium8 tablet (okay it was two weeks ago), but the company is already pitching the latest entry in the line. The Nextbook Premium9 has a nine-inch display, in keeping with the Southern California company's fairly straight-forward naming convention. The slate runs a basic version of Android 2.3 (though the company assures us that a Honeycomb upgrade is on the way) and packs in 4GB of memory (expandable via a MicroSD slot), a built-in speaker, a two megapixel front-facing camera and, as a bit of a throwback, a mini USB port.

We had a bit of trouble on the software front -- the tablet froze up on us a few times during our hands-on trial, in spite of the 1GHz processor inside. The hardware itself is a bit more promising, however. It's actually a pretty slick little tablet that has a nice feel in hand, thanks in part to its brushed metal rear -- though the tablet does feel a bit on the thick side. The asking price for the Gingerbread slate is $299, though the company made a point of letting us know that it'll likely be a bit cheaper when it goes on sale in November / December, running consumers closer to $269 -- better, sure, but perhaps still not low enough to bring too many folks over to the eFun way.

Gallery: E Fun Nextbook Premium9