Single review: ASUS ZenPad Z580CA-C1-BK Tablet Intel Atom Z3580 2.33 GHz 4 GB Memory 64 GB eMMC 8.0" 2048 x 1536 Touchscreen 2K IPS 5 MP Front / 8 MP Rear Camera Android 5.0 (Lollipop)

ASUS ZenPad Z580CA-C1-BK Tablet Intel Atom Z3580 2.33 GHz 4 GB Memory 64 GB eMMC 8.0" 2048 x 1536 Touchscreen 2K IPS 5 MP Front / 8 MP Rear Camera Android 5.0 (Lollipop)

8" IPS Display (2048 x 1536) with Corning Gorilla Glass3 and ASUS Tru2Life+ Technology
Intel Atom Z3580 Quad-Core 64-bit 2.33 GHz
4 GB RAM 64 GB eMMC Storage
1 x microSD Card slot, support up to 128 GB SDHC
8 MP Webcam

Great bang for the buck! 10/15/2015

This review is from: ASUS ZenPad Z580CA-C1-BK Tablet Intel Atom Z3580 2.33 GHz 4 GB Memory 64 GB eMMC 8.0" 2048 x 1536 Touchscreen 2K IPS 5 MP Front / 8 MP Rear Camera Android 5.0 (Lollipop)

Pros:

This is the second Asus Tablet that I’ve owned, the first was a transformer pad with keyboard. I have to say, Asus is a great company to purchase tech from. This is one of the fastest tablets I have used, and blows the transformer out of the water in terms of speed and performance. For the price point, this is an amazing tablet. Boot times are consistently under one minute. This thing is packed with great hardware; Intel Z3580 64-bit quad core processor with 2mb of cache, 4GB DDR3 Ram, 64GB eMMC flash storage, 802.11AC Wireless, 2048x1536 IPS LED lit panel, and two very nice front speakers with DTS HD audio. You’d be hard pressed to find another tablet with specs like this for the price.

First Impressions: Overall the tablet is very responsive to anything you want to do with it. It is a good size, 8 inches is much larger than my phone and much smaller than my laptop. It fits comfortably in my hand and is very light. I use it mainly for internet browsing, email, movies and audio, and light gaming like you would do on a phone. Right off the bat the screen on this device is amazing. Images and media are crystal clear – lots of screen real estate. The colors are fantastic and very realistic as well, wish my laptop had a screen like this!

Performance: This has handled everything I have tried with it. Streaming movies from my NAS – Check. Downloaded a 1.6GB app in minutes – Check. Playing an FPS Game with zero lag – Check. Using for business purposes (spreadsheets, email, internet) – check. The Intel processer and 4GB of Ram really shine on this tablet. For the most part I have kept this on the optimized power setting to balance battery life with performance and it works like a champ.

Battery Life: I get a full days use out of this tablet with intermitted use including watching youtube videos, browsing the web, responding to emails, and playing light games. I usually end the day with around 30% battery.

Buttons and Ports: The power and volume buttons are responsive and easy to press, but lack tactile feedback (see other thoughts). Micro SD slot can handle up to 128GB cards, but I’m only running an 8GB card in it. It does have a nice dust cover that protects the port with or without a card in it. USB-C adapter is great (it’s reversible) and will eventually offer be industry standard.

Software / OS: Android 5.0 Lollipop coupled with Asus Launcher is a pretty good deal. It’s easy enough to download and use the default Google Launcher, which is exactly what I’m doing. There are quite a few Asus apps that are preinstalled on the device and can’t be removed. They are unobtrusive, don’t drain the battery, and don’t take up too much space on the internal memory. I’ve already had two system updates to do which are quite quick.

The Screen: Amazing screen, really one of the best I’ve used. It has awesome color representation and contrast. The resolution is right in the sweet spot.

Cons:

The first con I noticed was the power button. It is very easy to accidentally press and turn the tablet on when it should have been off thus draining battery.

So far it has been quite difficult to find accessories for this device. It supports the Z-stylus from Asus, but I can’t find one to buy. It supports the Asus ZenPad S 8.0 TriCover, but I can’t find one to buy either. Hopefully these products will be more accessible soon because as of right now this tablet is completely unprotected.

Camera quality is lackluster at best. My phone takes way better pictures than this tablet, but you wouldn’t exactly be buying a tablet for the camera capabilities (at least I hope you wouldn’t). It is still featured on the product website as being a fantastic camera which it is clearly not. No Flash. Really, 2015 and you can’t put a simply LED on the back for flash capabilities? I will give credit where credit is due and say there are a lot of options to play around with in the settings for the camera so it may be possible to milk a little more performance out of the camera by tweaking these, but I want a camera that works great out of the box.

The screen is a bit finicky on touch sometimes. It responds slowly and sometimes not even at all. This did start happening after the latest update so that could be the possible cause. Hopefully when an update comes out it will be fixed.

Overall Review:

Overall this is a fantastic tablet. The cost to value on this device is superior then any tablet I’ve used. One of my usual questions to answer for a review is, would I recommend this to a friend? The answer is absolutely. The pros far outweigh the cons on this device, it really is a great overall machine.

I used this for a flight to Spain and in airplane mode on the 6 hour flight I was still left with over 50% battery while watching movies the entire time. Really a great device!

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Greg V.
Verified Owner
Owned For: 1 month to 1 year

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