 It's been a long time since we've done an unboxing in the cameraman's office. As you can see, it's kind of gone to ruin in the time that I haven't been here to help him clear space from time to time. Got old game controllers. Not that the cameraman has any idea how to play a game, being a Mac guy and all that. Okay, cameraman, we're doing some cleanup. He's got his precious money all over the place. So I wonder if he has any money. He spends so much on making sure that he has a Mac instead of getting a PC, which is a better value. Ahem. Okay, so today we have something totally unrelated to Mac or PC. This is actually an Android tablet. This is the Cruise tablet from Velocity Micro. And it looks pretty cool. So first things first, we've got a sticker on the front, Kindle for Android. So you can read more than 725,000 Kindle books with the free applications on the Cruise tablet. If you are a non-US customer, book availability may vary. So that might be relevant to me, given I am here in the great white north of Canada. Alright. Let's see what they have to say for themselves on the box. So, you can view your Cruise tablet at the right angle with the Cruise stand. So there's a stand dimensions, you got the compatible products, there's a little stand, okay. I don't know that it comes with that, I guess we'll find out. Here on the back, little sim thing, all the applications you need in the palm of your hand. And here's our specs. So it has a 7 inch slim TFT, so that basically just means LCD screen. 800 by 600, capacitive touch. It is a 4 to 3 aspect ratio, so that's interesting. This is not widescreen. It runs off Android 2.0, has a browser, okay, 256 megs of RAM. 4 gigs of built-in storage with a 4 gig external SD card, but you can't expand that. It comes with WiFi, it has a G sensor. Battery is up to 6 hours of watching video. We've got dimensions here, but we're going to pull it out and show you guys later. It has support for SDHC, so you can support up to, I believe it's 32 gigs on SDHC. Video playback is here, reader files, stand, oh the stand is included, there you go. Here's all a few different things that you can do. Surf the web, use the online bookstore. You can access your social media, really it's app driven, much like any Android device. You can watch videos, view documents, it has a dictionary. I don't know why they would necessarily call it the dictionary, but whatever. Manage your files, and it has a G sensor, so it will automatically rotate from portrait to landscape. More features here, which we've pretty much covered most of those. Also includes an alarm clock apparently, a calculator. I mean it better include a calculator, you know, this kind of a price point. And this advanced device. Okay, so packaging wise, here we go, we have a white box, which has more of a white box on the inside. There's the tablet itself, not going to show you that just yet. Here is a nice little, okay, there's our included 4 gig SanDisk SDHC card. Here is a little sleeve, which includes some information about the warranty. So there's our SD card, here's the limited warranty, okay, something about one year. Okay, so it has a one year warranty. Next we've got a quick start guide, why don't we have a look at that after we turn it on. And then we have a little, a little sort of foamy sleeve for it. So that's pretty nice actually. Alright, here's the little cruise stand, so you can use it at the correct angle. Alright, and then we have a charger. So that's it, fairly simple accessory package. Let's have a look at the cruise tablet itself. It's got a little bit of a heft to it, but it's more of a feel solid weight than a feels heavy weight, kind of like the iPhone 4. Like the iPhone 4 is heavy, but it's just heavy because it's like feels solidly built. So I'm going to go ahead and try and find the power button, which is here. So let's wait for it to power on while we show you guys all the other buttons. So we've got reset, check it out, USB, that's something your iPhone doesn't have. Okay, there's our SD slot, so that's your expandable storage up to 32 gigs. On this side, we've got volume controls up and down. We've got a little bit of cruise branding going on there. Moving along to the bottom, we've got a headphone jack, some kind of indicator LED. We have speakers, which are built right into the bottom here, as well as our power in. And then on the other side, nothing. So it's got a fairly clean overall look to the outside of it. On the back, you just see a little Velocity Micro logo, cruise tablet, you've got your serial number, as well as some FCC, you know, it complies with part whatever of whatever. Here we've got Android booting up now. And why don't we wait for it to boot up and then we'll be back. And yeah, it's not quite booted up yet. Oh, it's booted up. Cameraman's gesturing to me. So I guess we better do that. Oh, look, there we go. So the screen is right away, nice and vibrant. I'm going to see if I can find some, I think here is settings. Yeah. So let's play around with some of the stuff. So we've got wireless networks, works pretty much like any other Android device. So we've got our navigation up here. Move it down a little bit. There we go. So let's see, I want screen is a big one for me. So let's see what the display is going to look like if we tinker around with a little bit. So brightness, it's at its maximum brightness right now. It goes all the way down to here. So I'd say sort of a happy medium is probably right there around 35 to 40 percent. That's where I usually end up when I'm using any of these kinds of devices. This one seems to have a full charge on it right now. We can show animations. Cool. So yeah, there we go. So now the screens are going to be animating. You know what? Give me a second to get connected to the Wi-Fi and then we'll go a little further into this. So here we go. We got the Android App Store installed. It actually didn't come with that preinstalled on the tablet, which is a very strange thing to me. But here it is. So I just downloaded Angry Birds. Connecting to the Wi-Fi only took me a couple minutes, which is pretty cool. Just had to enter the password for the Wi-Fi here at the office. Using the App Store is pretty much like using the App Store on my friend's phone back when I was deciding whether to get... Here, let me see. Where's like... Here, why don't we see if there's like a Facebook app or something. Back when I was deciding whether to get the Galaxy S Vibrant or the iPhone 4. Although the cameraman did bring my attention to the fact that Android 2.0, what this guy's running, is not really that similar to the Android that is running on the phones that are out there right now. It's slightly more up to date. So this is what there is for Facebook. Why don't we just have a look and see if our Angry Birds is done. Not just yet. So let's... You know... Okay, I have to criticize a couple things. It's not as fast as I would ideally like. It's not quite as... The screen's not quite as bright as I would ideally like. But it's got a lot going for it. And that is that the price is really low. So this thing is less than 250 bucks at retail. It does have the agreement in place with Amazon where you can use it as a Kindle ebook reader. So that makes it... It puts it down in that ebook price point where it becomes a very good value proposition. And you don't really need the speed for those kinds of applications. So here you can just sign in with your Amazon credentials. Okay. So why don't we go ahead and check out Angry Birds here. See how well that runs on this little tablet. Of course that's what I would care about, right? Do I want to install this application? Yep. Okay. We'll come back once it's installed. Okay. We weren't able to install Angry Birds. What I've discovered is that that app store is not actually like the Android market that I'm familiar with. So it doesn't have some of the same good stuff in it. We did find a YouTube app though in the... In the Cruise app store. And there's also a Facebook one in there. So let's see how well the YouTube one works. I'm just running one of my own YouTube videos. This is a 720p video. Yes, it is high end and I mean very high end. Hmm. Okay. Let's see if there's a way to run this in higher quality. I'll be back in a minute. So we were watching it in horrible quality. Why don't we watch in normal quality? That might help a little bit. Yes, it is high end and I mean very high end graphics model unboxing time. Okay, a little bit. Again, this is the Radeon HD6990. It features... I don't really see anywhere to adjust the volume. Hold on....technology. Okay, details, comments. Oh, oh, I can rate my video. But this is, check this out, four gigs of GDDR5 memory. Yes, four gigs of memory. Okay. So, what do you think? Well, I think that they're probably focusing on the correct marketing points on the box when they emphasize it as like a Kindle reader because with the overall build of it, feeling very solid, very nice and the screen being quite adequate, I think that it would make for like a great e-book reader. And since there, you can access the internet on it. And I will show you the browsing speed in just a moment. Here, here, let's try this one more time. Watch in normal quality. Let's see if it gets any better. That was probably buffering right now. Okay. Let's show you guys the browser. So, we're going to go to ncix.com. Okay, press home. Okay, we got a browser. Do do do. Ncix.com. Let's go there. Oops. Okay, let's try that again. Ncix.com. Go. Let's try that go button. That might work better. So, here's where we downloaded the YouTube V1.3 because you can see it's not like an Android YouTube app. It's like specifically for the cruise reader. So, I think they probably still got some work to do as far as the app development goes. And once those mature a little bit, once the installed base of these devices gets a little bit wider, then I think we'll see some definite improvements in the overall responsiveness of the apps. Here we go. So, we're loading up the NCIX site. Oh, you can double tap to zoom in and zoom out. So, that's kind of neat. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to check out the forums. You can see we've got St. Patrick's deals going on on ncix.com right now. So, we've moved significantly closer to our access point and we're actually having a little bit more success with the browsing speed. Okay, so let's go to the main forum home. So, basically I think the conclusion at this point is that as an e-reader or for checking email, actually this is pretty unbeatable for the price, but I wouldn't expect to be doing any heavy lifting. Let's see if we can get it to browse a little bit faster now because I did have some success with faster browsing. So, here we go. Now we can navigate. So, I'm quite close to my access point from here and that's giving me some more success. Although, it's still not fast by any stretch of the imagination for mobile browsing, but I mean it's more than adequate for like email or whatever the case may be. So, thank you for checking out this video on the Velocity Micro Cruise Tablet. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.