Review: Asus MeMO Pad 8
Monday, January 13, 2014 at 3:40PM 
Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
The 8-inch tablet market is exploding right now with various Android and Windows 8 models competing with the iPad mini. Asus has been successful with its 7-inch Android tablets, specially its Nexus 7 device which has been a huge hit. How does their 8-inch Asus MeMO Pad device fare? We take a look.
What is it?
The Asus MeMO Pad 8 is a consumer class 8-inch tablet that features the Rockchip RK3188 Quad-Core, 1.6 GHz processor, it runs the 4.2 version of Android OS which is not the latest available, but is imbued with Asus own apps and interface overlay.
The MeMO Pad 8 comes with 16GB of storage but it has a microSD expansion slot. It features a 1.2 MP Front Camera ( 720p Video Recording ), a 5 MP Rear Camera ( 1080p Video Recording ) and an 8" LED Backlight WXGA (1280x800) IPS screen.
Impressions
At first glance, the Asus MeMO Pad 8 is easy to confuse with Samsung's Galaxy Tab 8, which is similarly sized and coloured white. The Asus is actually a bit thicker and slightly heavier than the Samsung but the plus side of this is that it feels sturdier.
This is a budget tablet but with suprisingly above average specs. The $240 SRT is comparable to competing devices and give a well-rounded feature set for the price.
Druing my time with the device, I enjoyed surfing the Internet, checking out Google +, as well as reading the news and playing back YouTube videos. I did find the screen to be bright and clear but it was a bit more reflective than what I would have liked.
Conclusion
The Asus MeMO Pad 8 is a good all around tablet and it runs a fairly recent version of Android (although there's no telling if KitKat is on the way for this device). Still, it is priced slightly higher than a high-end eBook reader and it offers a larger tablet experience at a comparable price. Asus loyalists now have an 8-inch device to call their own, everyone else might gravitate towards other devices.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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