Asus MeMO Pad 7 ME572C review - now with Android 5.0 Lollipop

With its new 'clutch bag' design, there's no prize for guessing the demographic Asus wants to target with its latest MeMO Pad 7 tablet. However, despite a design that resembles a lady's purse from behind, the ME572C is an excellent all-round tablet for all genders, with a powerful chipset, excellent screen and brilliant battery life.

It's a slightly odd design, not least due to the presence of two different textures on the left and the right of the tablet when you hold it in portrait mode, but this slim, lightweight tablet really is great for popping in your bag. It's very slim and light, but the MeMO Pad 7 ME572C still feels fantastically built, and its solid chassis feels like it could take its fair share of knocks. Its sharp, angular corners aren't the most comfortable when holding the tablet for long periods of time, but at least its textured rear and slightly rubberised sides give you plenty of grip.

This year's MeMO Pad 7 also has an upgraded display. Instead of sticking to the previous model's 1,280x800 resolution, the MeMO Pad 7 now has a massive 1,920x1,200 resolution, giving it a pixel density of 323 pixels per inch. This beats the Acer Iconia One 7 's ppi of 215 by quite some margin, and the difference is plain to see when looking at the tablets side by side. Whereas the Iconia One 7's app icons and text are a little fuzzy round the edges, the MeMO Pad 7's were noticeably sharper.

Display

The MeMO Pad 7's display also has one of the best IPS panels we've seen in this price range. In our screen tests, our colour calibrator showed the display was showing an impressive 90.9% of the sRGB colour gamut. Reds were a little weak, but otherwise its colour coverage hit every other gamut boundary, ensuring rich, vibrant looking images with more accurate colours than on the Iconia One 7.

We were also pleased with the MeMO Pad 7's high 1,338:1 contrast ratio. This produced a much higher level of fine shadow detail in our test images than Acer's Iconia One 7 could manage. The screen's peak brightness of 401.8cd/m2 isn't the brightest we've seen, but is still pretty high, and we had no trouble at all seeing the screen clearly outdoors.

The high quality screen doesn't take its toll on the MeMO Pad 7's battery life either, as we saw an excellent 12h 7m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our standard 170cd/m2 brightness. This is superb for a 7in tablet, giving it roughly the same battery life as several large 10in tablets we've tested. This makes the tablet ideal for long journeys, and it should definitely keep you going all day even with heavy usage.

Specifications

The MeMO Pad 7 is also a compact powerhouse. Armed with a quad-core Intel Atom Z3560 processor clocked at 1.8GHz and 2GB of RAM, it's one of the most capable 7in tablets we've tested. In BaseMark OS II, for instance, is scored an impressive 1,073 overall, surpassing the Tesco Hudl 2 by almost 100 points, and its BrowserMark score of 1,548 meant that web browsing was supremely smooth, even when there were several images onscreen.

It's also good for playing games, as it managed a massive 17,865 in our BaseMark X 1.1 graphics benchmark on Medium quality settings, averaging 21.8fps in the Dunes test and 29.0fps in the Hangar test. Frame rates dropped to 16.6fps and 14.2fps respectively when we switched over to High quality settings, but its overall score of 11,149 is still great for a £150 tablet.