© QTAB.com. Full technical specs are here.

Souq.com launched their QTAB tablet last year. Shaped much like the iPad mini — so much so that a couple of people mistook it for one while it sat on my desk — the QTAB is a barebones Android device that arrives with a couple of hardware quirks.

A closer look of the device and the differences from the standard comparison devices are apparent. For starters, the QTAB has both its hardware buttons at the top — power on the top left, home on the top right. While change is sometimes good, I can't say this was an easy transition. I often found myself hitting the home button to sleep/wake the device. Similarly the volume buttons are soft touch at the bottom of the screen — something easily forgotten when you want to quickly turn up and down the volume.

Experienced tablet users would be easily annoyed by these changes; however, first time users — and I believe this is where the QTAB is looking to target the market — should just use this as a baseline instead without too much fuss.

The other area where I believe the QTAB has some work to do is boot up. Restarting the device takes some time (and I found myself restarting it fairly often to clear out the wifi connection, for example) — I timed it at 41s during one restart. This is particularly interesting since there didn't seem to be any bloatware installed on the device. Normally this wouldn't be a bother; but when the device stayed idle for a few hours, it would refuse to connect to the wifi unless rebooted.