lfrolov November 19, 2013 at 11:00

Ramos i9 - 8.9-inch tablet with Full HD screen on Intel Atom

By the end of the year, tablets on the x86 Intel Atom Clover Trail + chip began to appear in the Chinese market. If the 7.9 "models on such a chip are not so interesting due to the low screen resolution, then the Ramos i9 tablet captivates with its 8.9-inch screen with a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels.
The cost of the tablet is also very nice - about $ 220 including delivery.

► Specifications

Screen: 8.9 ", 1920x1200px, IPS

Chip: Intel Atom Z2580 (2 GHz, 2 cores) Video accelerator

: PowerVR SGX 544MP2

Operating system: Android 4.2.2

RAM: 2 GB LPDDR2 ROM

: 16 GB

Camera: front 2 MP, rear - 5 MP

Optional: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth

Battery: 6500 mAh

Dimensions: 235 * 150 * 8.5 mm

Weight: 441 grams The

characteristics look very decent - excellent screen resolution, 2GB RAM, good PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU. There is no built-in 3G , only wifi and bluetooth.

► Appearance and equipment

The tablet comes in a rather large white box made of thick cardboard:

Brief technical specifications are indicated at the back:

Standard equipment is rather meager: a charger and a USB cable.

The back of the tablet has a glossy plastic insert:

It looks good, and the white color is very to the face - the prints are almost imperceptible.

Intel inside:

Rear 5 MP camera:

The power button and volume control are in the upper left corner.

The buttons are very nice, they are pressed clearly, they do not make noise when shaking the tablet.

The headphone input and microUSB input for connecting to a PC or charger are on the left.

The microSD card slot is located on top of the end:

Unfortunately, the card latch is so deep that it is almost impossible to insert a card without nails or any other sharp object.

The tablet is framed in a silver metal frame, it looks interesting:

2 speakers are located at the bottom of the tablet at the bottom, but they do not close when holding with your palms.
It should be noted that the speakers are very loud, watching movies on the tablet is a pleasure!

Front view:

Not everything is so beautiful here - the thick frames around the screen spoil the solidity of the tablet. But it’s convenient to hold both horizontally and vertically in your hands:

If you do not pay attention to the frames around the screen, the tablet will turn out to be interesting, the beautiful back panel and the metal insert around the perimeter give the tablets a strict look.

► Screen

The Ramos i9 has an 8.9-inch IPS screen with a resolution of 1920 × 1200 pixels. The pixel density is 254 PPI.
It is beautiful, bright, juicy, with a good level of maximum brightness:

But with a drawback, there is a noticeable unevenness of the backlight (in my case, the lower right corner was most affected):

Perhaps this is a “feature” of the tablet from the first installments and this problem was fixed in new deliveries .

Viewing angles are excellent and pleasing to the eye:

►Wifi

Built-in Wifi-module supports 802.11 b / g / n. The signal level through one wall is acceptable:

In addition to Wifi, the Ramos i9 also has a built-in Bluetooth module.

►Hardware

The tablet has a dual-core x86 Intel Atom Z2580 processor with a frequency of up to 2 GHz and a PowerVR SGX544MP2 video accelerator. The amount of RAM standard LPDDR2 is 2GB, the amount of permanent memory - 16GB.
A productive x86 processor with a maximum frequency of 2 GHz shows good results in all performance tests.
Let's start with Antutu: the

result is more than 20,000 more than its closest competitor Pipo M7 Pro on the 4-core Rockchip RK3188 by about 2000 points (you can find the results of testing Pipo M7 Pro in review on ixbt.com )

Continuing Quadrant:

Again, the superiority over the competitor RK3188 is about 1000 points.

The results of Nenamark 2 are a bit short of 60fps:

Vellamo’s excellent HTML5 processing speed:

Let's see what PowerVR SGX544 is capable of in 3DMark benchmark:
Ice Storm test:

Ice Storm Extreme:

Ice Storm Unlimited:

In all tests, the PowerVR SGX544MP2 video accelerator scores good results.

The picture in the Epic Citadel benchmark pleases the eye with a result of 57.9 fps. The

Intel Atom Z2580 proved to be a fairly efficient chip that outperforms its closest competitor Rockchip RK3188 with similar tablet specifications.

►Video

There are no problems with video encoding. At the first launch of MX Player, he will offer to download and install additional codecs for the X86 architecture.
We tested video files with different resolutions from 480p to 1080p, with a bit rate from 1800K to 7200K and H.264, MPEG4, MPEG2, VC1 codecs. Test files were taken from http://samplemedia.linaro.org/ .
No problems with the image or sound were found.

►Games

The quite popular PowerVR SGX544MP2 GPU is great for games, but in conjunction with Intel Atom there are nuances and some games do not want to run.
Failed to launch: Six Guns (crashes from the menu), Modern Combat 4 (cyclically loads the menu), Dead Effect (crashes from the menu)
Successfully launched games:
Bladeslinger :

Fifa 14 :

Iron Man 3 :

Only a limited list of games was tested, in fact the list of games that run a lot more. It was not possible to identify any dependencies in order to predict whether the game will work or not.
Problems with the launch of arcade games were not observed. Successful Angry Birds have been tried ,Cut the rope , and Plants vs Zombies 2 :

► Software

Preinstalled Android 4.2.2 with a minimally modified launcher. I changed it to APEX Launcher .

The system has a utility for automatically updating firmware via the Internet:

Undoubtedly, this is a very convenient way of updating, which does not require additional knowledge of installing drivers and additional software from the user.

►Battery life

A battery with a capacity of 6500mAh is installed in Ramos i9, which is confirmed from a photo of a disassembled tablet from one resource:

Interesting results are obtained when playing 720p video, at a brightness of 100%, 50%, 25%, the battery life is about the same, and even the included Wifi does not affect the result .
Playing videos at 50% brightness:

Playing videos at 100% brightness with Wifi turned on in the background:

When playing Plants vs Zombies 2 for 1 hour and 30 minutes, the charge level decreased from 100% to 54%, then the tablet worked when playing 720p video another two and a half hours:

For unknown reasons, the Antutu Battery Tester battery test interrupted after 30-40 minutes of operation.
Not the best indicators of battery life. Even lowering the maximum processor frequency from 2 GHz to 933 MHz, the operating time remained the same - about 4-4.5 hours.
You can note the heating in the upper left of the tablet.
If in a calm state the temperature is 22 degrees,

then after half an hour of games the temperature is already about 45 degrees. The

heat feels good, but this does not affect the stability of the tablet.

► Advantages and disadvantages

Good performance

Good sound quality from the built-in speakers

Uneven screen illumination

Problem with game compatibility

Battery life

A very good attempt by Ramos to make an affordable tablet on the productive Intel Atom. Let's hope that in the new firmware updates the problem of fast battery discharge will be fixed.

You can buy a Ramos i9 tablet in the Geekbuying.com store for $ 213.59 using the JMBCSVNG coupon. I

remind you that you can subscribe in order not to miss new reviews and articles