Lenovo IdeaTab A1000

If you don't need cellular, go for Nexus 7 (2012) model which is almost same price now. This one is also good! The build quality is nice. But screen viewing angle is not so good, plus lacks 3G. Over all battery and build quality is good for everyday usage.

This tablet is a nightmare.
I had a friend order one for me. I came from some third party vendor through flipkart. It came with a no return policy. I did not bother one bit. I had bought it for keeps really. I thought what ever problems it could have would be minor.

but wait. 2 days after I bought it, it goes of into a self test mode. And then fails a series of tests and stays put with a character screen for ever.

You cannot turn off this blasted piece of trash.

You just have to let the battery drain for the next 8 to 16 hours. Apparently then you can recharge it and use it.
I ran in panic to the service center in Hyderabad - Ameerpet with this thing. There is an aged couple sitting right in front of me with exactly the same problems. And there is an engineer helping them with the issue. But they put me through the same rigmarole for 3 hours before they diagnosed it as a faulty battery (same as the other case). And kept it for 2 weeks.

I cannot reach these angels on the phone. for 5 working days straight (with several holidays in between) I tried their landline. It connects, and a beautiful voice from heaven on the IVR tells me I am a very valuable customer etc and I have to wait for service. Several minutes later it goes off into a forbidding vacuous silence.

I am able to get to the lenovo call center. The gentleman on that call center also tried the service center for some time. And then advised me that the service center is not receiving calls and the only way for me to find out what is happening is go back to this place 17 km from my home. Oh it is just next door. He is not asking me to go to Delhi like the local MPs have to do for resolving issues on a case by case basis.

I land at this service center. And then suddenly I am informed that the nice folks have noticed my case and are replacing the battery. I have to sit for 1 hour to collect my tab.

Anyway I bring it back home after two weeks. And then the fun starts again.

I come home and then notice my google account is not working on this tab. After 2 hours of panic again, suddenly it starts working. And the next couple of days I scramble to install my apps that I had cleared out before handing it in for service.

There is a very interesting design bomb in this tablet. To start with it has only a 4 gb internal storage. Bad design in the first place, but a workable hardware for os and apps.

But wait a minute. 1.5 gb is occupied by the OS. and 2.5 GB is left. Not too bad. But here is the real joke. you can install apps only on 500 mb. Some engineer with a wicked sense of practical humor produced this crap. the remaining 2gb is reported as external usb memory. apps will not typically install to this. You have to install an additional app like app2sd for moving apps out to this 2 gb partition.
Then this workaround it will not work with many apps. the 500 mb fills up very rapidly. in about 20 apps.