Asus MeMO Pad 7 ME572C review

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. 

Android

At the moment, the MeMO Pad 7 runs Android 4.4, but it's due an upgrade to Android 5.0 within the next few months, so you needn't worry about buying an out-of-date tablet. Instead of just using stock Android, Asus has used its own Zen UI skin, which gives the tablet its own unique look and feel. In terms of appearance, it's not too dissimilar from stock Android, as you still have an app tray that houses all your applications and a separate notifications and quick settings menu accessible by swiping down from the top left and right of the screen.

However, we particularly like how Zen UI makes the most of the lock screen, as here you'll find the time, weather and date along with three customisable shortcut buttons to open any app of your choice. The buttons are set to open the camera, web browser and basic email app by default, but you can change them to open any trio of apps you like in the Lock Screen settings.

^ The ME572C's lock screen provides much more information than your average Android tablet, and we particularly like the calendar timeline and multiple shortcut buttons

The MeMO Pad 7 does come with a lot of pre-installed apps, but Asus' app tray has several features to help ease any problems with organisation. For instance, its handy Smart Folder option can group your app tray apps into specific folders, making them easier to find, and you can also uninstall or disable apps directly from the app tray instead of going into the main settings menu. You can also adjust the grid size of the app tray to fit more apps on a single page, hide certain apps from view, or lock apps in place so you don't have to go hunting for them. 

Camera

On the back is a 5-megapixel camera. While detail is never going to be in huge supply with a sensor of this size, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of our photos, as colours looked natural and accurate and the camera's HDR mode was very effectively at capturing the correct exposure of the sky and ironing out dark patches of shadow. HDR mode also heightened smaller areas of contrast as well, making window ledges and street signs, for instance, really pop out of the picture.

^ The ME572C's camera coped well with exposing the sky, but HDR mode was much more effective at capturing brighter cloud detail

There are plenty of extra camera modes, too, including Panorama, Night, Selfie, Beautification and Time Rewind, which takes several shots at once and lets you pick the best one using its responsive onscreen slider. There's also Miniature mode, which blurs everything outside a pre-defined circle or rectangle onscreen to let you focus in on tiny details, and a Depth of Field mode, which is surprisingly effective for up-close macro shots. There's even a GIF maker for creating short animations which you can either speed up or slow down on the post-editing screen.

Conclusion

With so many versatile features, the Asus MeMO Pad 7 ME572C is by far one of the best compact tablets around. It is reasonably expensive at £150, but it provides an excellent step up from the Tesco Hudl 2 if you want something small that's faster, has better battery life and a more colour-accurate screen. It's also been confirmed to receive an Android 5.0 update, which is more than can be said for other tablets we've tested in this price range. The Hudl2 is still a great buy, but if your budget can stretch the extra £50, the MeMO Pad 7 has some distinct advantages. 

If neither of those suit your needs, then check out our regularly-updated Best tablets 2015 and buying guide.