7 quad core android 5.1 lcd touch screen dl718m digiland made in china

The Digiland DL718M tablet is an inexpensive (sub-$40) tablet sold at consumer electronics stores like Best Buy. Make no mistake, a Digiland tablet is a basic tablet for basic needs. But given reasonable expectations you can buy one of these and be happy with it.

This isn’t a new market by any stretch. But it seems like tablets in this price range are usually Black Friday specials, or only available on online marketplaces far abroad. The Digiland DL718M, or today’s equivalent, is one you can get today if you want.

I’ve said before what minimums you should look for in a tablet. Unlike many tablets in this price range, the Digiland DL718M meets or beats all of them. It has a quad-core 1.3 GHz Mediatek CPU, a 1024×600 screen, 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB of storage, and a micro SD slot for expansion. Officially it supports up to a 32GB card. Unofficially some devices can go higher than that; I don’t have a higher-capacity card to try.

For networking, it can do 802.11b, g, and n at 2.4 GHz. It runs Android 5.1 (Lollipop), which is a version back but not as far behind as some Android devices I see at this price point. And it’s about as close to vanilla Android as you’ll find. That’s a big plus.

This is also the first Android device I’ve seen that has a reset button, or at least has it accessible and labeled as such. That’s not something you should need very often, but it’s a nice touch.

The box contains a tablet, a charger, USB cable, a slip of paper with the details of the 90-day warranty, and a quad-fold user manual that amusingly warns your tablet might get fever if you play intensive 3D games on it. I think it means the tablet will get warm.

The Digiland DL718M tablet features stock Android and meets all of the minimums you want to look for in a tablet. It won’t knock your socks off but it’s a good value at $40.

My initial impression wasn’t good–the keyboard was very inaccurate. What I eventually found was the factory-installed film over the screen interfered with it; once I removed the film, typing improved considerably. The film does a nice job of protecting the tablet in shipping. But clearly isn’t designed to double as an in-use screen protector. If you get one and can’t type on it, take off the film.

The screen’s resolution won’t wow you and the system’s speed is best described as adequate. It’s nearly stock Android, which is a plus. OEM bloat is usually the reason for poor-performing tablets. The box bills the screen as being an IPS panel. I don’t know about that, but the viewing angle and color fidelity was much better than I expected.

One thing I had to keep reminding myself is that the Digiland DL718M cost 40 bucks. At that price point, the main question is whether the tablet makes you feel like you wasted 40 bucks. I wouldn’t say this tablet does that. If this tablet had existed three years ago and cost $99, I would have recommended it at that price. My kids’ games run on it, and it’s powerful enough to read e-books on, play music or watch movies. For occasional web browsing or checking e-mail or social media it would be OK, though not great. When I launched Chrome and viewed several of my favorite sites with it, rendering was noticeably slower than any PC made in the last decade or so, though they did all work.

If you need something to compare it to so you can set your expectations, it’s slightly slower than the original Nexus 7 tablet and the screen resolution is a notch lower. But getting something almost as good as the Nexus 7 factory-new for $40 is an achievement.

Quality control on a $40 tablet isn’t likely to be optimal. So by all means burn it in when you get it. If you get a bad Digiland tablet, boot it by holding down the volume down button with the power button and wipe the device with the second from the last menu option, then exchange or return it.

I normally say not to buy extended warranties, but for tablets like these, it’s not so bad of an idea, even when it costs half as much as the tablet. I don’t expect DL718M parts to be easy to find. For $20, if you need a replacement screen, battery, or micro USB port within two years, getting and installing parts is someone else’s problem, not yours.

I’ve seen enough cracked screens that I don’t recommend giving kids a tablet that costs hundreds of dollars. At this price point, you don’t have to worry much.  It would also be a good device to pack in a travel bag, and at 7.5 x 4.3 inches and less than a half-inch thick, it won’t take a lot of space. Load up your favorite media on a micro SD card, and you can read, watch, or listen to whatever you want at the airport or on a plane while saving your phone for business-related purposes.

Don’t expect comparable performance to a $150 tablet from a Digiland. But that said, I’ve seen tablets with nearly identical specs that sell for twice what this one sells for. All things being equal I’d prefer a name brand to a no-name brand. But I don’t think a big name brand is worth double the price.

It took right about six months for my youngest son to crack the back of his tablet. But it’s better the back than the front. Admittedly, I think the back cases of these tablets are a bit flimsier than some others. The presence of Digiland backs on Ebay suggests this happens to other people too. Not all parts are interchangeable so make sure you match the part with your particular model number.

I don’t expect the Digiland DL718M to be as durable as the Acer, but if one or both of the ones I bought fail in a year or two, the $40 tablets that replace them will likely be better in at least one regard.

The DigiLand DL718M is available in black, ocean breeze (a bright blue), red, and purple.This device was released in December of 2015. It is an Android tablet, and uses the Android 5.1 Lollipop OS. This Operating System is easy to navigate, and versatile in its functions.

The LCD screen backlight functions well when trying to read various digital books. It is also compatible with the Amazon Kindle app. This tablet is the main competitor to the Amazon Fire Tablet, but less expensive.

While the Fire tablet is better than most tablets in that price range, the difference in quality is smaller than you would think. Take the Digiland DL718M, for example.

This tablet carries the brand of a company that most tablet buyers have never heard of, and it was made by some random Chinese OEM. Given my experience with Android tablets, those two black marks, when combined with what I thought was an impossible low price, would be enough to for me to warn others away from buying this tablet.

But in spite of the strikes against this tablet, the DL718M is a surprisingly decent tablet that gives the Fire tablet a run for its money. It is not _as_ good as the Fire tablet, in many ways, but I would still call it am acceptable alternative.

Note: As I sat here writing this post, I checked for another sub-$50 tablet I might review next week. All of the ones I found on BestBuy, MicroCenter, Walmart, and Fry’s were either older units with weaker CPUs (and sometimes lower resolution screens) or newer units with only half the RAM (512MB vs 1GB). So the Fire tablet and the DL718M could be unique (or they could be the first of the new wave).

And while the Fire tablet does use slightly better components (shell, camera, screen), the Android 5.1 Lollipop running on the DL718M makes for a tablet which is both more open and versatile as well as easier to use.

Both tablets run on  a quad-core 1.3GHz MediaTek MTK8127 CPU with 1GB RAM, a Mali-450 GPU, a pair of cameras (2MP and VGA), Wifi/Bluetooth, and a single rear-facing speaker.

Both tablets have equally functional touchscreens (I’m happy, anyway) but the screen on the Fire is noticeably better. It has wider viewing angles, better color, and a brighter backlight. I also found that the screen on the Fire has a yellow tint when viewing an ebook in the Kindle app.

The Fire has the better screen, but that does not mean that the DL718M has a bad screen. I found the screen on this tablet to be quite satisfactory. I am happy with it, and that says more than you might think. I have reviewed pricier budget tablets and set them aside unsatisfied because I did not like the screen. I have no similar objections to the DL718M.

Here are photos I took this morning at a Chik-fil-a. The one on the left is from the DL718M, and as you can see it had trouble coping with the reflected sunlight (which wasn’t all that bright). The Dl718M also had trouble with light sources in general (all the photos showed either a halo around light fixtures or reflected glare). The Fire tablet’s camera handled it a little better.

Just so you know, I culled all but the best photo I took with the DL718M, so the one at left is literally the best it can do. That is unfortunate, but it is also not a surprise; these are cheap tablets after all.

But do you know what did surprise me? How the Fire tablet did not have significantly better battery life. My tests showed that the Fire tablet had around six and a half hours of video playing time, which slightly out lasts the five-ish hours that the DL718M would last.

That’s not a big enough difference to declare one device a clear winner, and the Fire tablet’s persistent problem with standby time further complicates the issue. .The DL718M will last days in standby, and if not for heavy use I wouldn’t have charged it in five days I have owned it. The Fire tablet, on the other hand, has mysteriously drained itself several times in the months since I bought it.

The DL718M runs Android 5.1 Lollipop, and as we all know, Amazon’s Fire tablets run its own version of Android. In the case of the $50 Fire tablet, the operating system is Fire OS Bellini. I’m told it’s based on Android 5.x, but the parts we get to see are entirely Amazon.

The Fire tablet is based around a multi-screen, multi-panel, multi-directional home page. And if that sound complicated and confusing, good, because so is the user interface.

And to be clear, I am not just talking about the adverts on the lock screen; the entire home page is designed around the goal of selling you shit, and not designed so you can use the content after you buy it. (Proving this point is beyond the scope of this post, so I’ll expand upon the point in a comment. Or, ask and I’ll write a follow up post.)

I am making the point about sale vs use because while Amazon had used the previous versions of Fire OS to make the Fire tablet a media tablet, the UI was focused more on use rather than sales. I have a Fire HD 7 on my desk, and it’s still running the older Fire OS. Its home screen is based around using the damned carousel to show you the content on your device, and while there is a small space devoted to pitching content those pitches can be disabled.

The Fire tablet’s UI is designed around selling, while the DL718M runs a stock version of Android 5.1 Lollipop and is designed around use or action rather than the sales pitch. And even though this is the first time I’ve used Lollipop and I’m still getting over the shock of a change from KitKat, I appreciate the differences between this OS and Bellini.

And it’s not just the security measures that put the DL718M ahead of the Fire tablet; the Fire tablet is also plagued by minor but annoying software bugs. It consistently fails to be recognized when I plug it into my laptop, it frequently neglects to sync and download the apps and ebooks I push to it, and there’s also that mysterious battery drain.

So yeah, the stock Android on the DL718M is really growing on me, even though it does have a couple issues (like the default portrait view puts the power and volume buttons on the lower edge). And I also encountered an issue with unsupported audio drivers in the stock video player, but that was readily fixed by installing a competing app.

Aside from the issue of installing Amazon Video on the DL718M (the app is only supported on Android phones), for the most part I didn’t have an issue with apps on either tablet. The apps I have installed on the 718M look and behave the same as the ones installed on the Fire tablet. This includes Amazon’s own apps such as Kindle and Audible.

What we have here are two pretty decent tablets that are designed to fill different needs and serve different purposes. One is a sales platform for Amazon, while the other  is a tool for users. So if you are invested in the Amazon ecosystem, the Fire tablet is a great buy. But if you want to use your tablet rather than simply consumer content from Amazon, you should get the DL718M.

If not for the fact that I already own tablets that fill its niche. I would keep the DL718M around so I could test Android apps. But I cannot justify the cost.

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