You may not be familiar with Chinese manufacturer E-Fun, but there is a good chance that the company's latest product has caught your eye. The E-Fun Nextbook 8, an 8-inch Windows tablet, sells for a very low $149 list price, but is being heavily advertised in Walmart's Black Friday circulars on sale for $99. That price is low enough to make the tablet a stocking stuffer, or a present for a gadget-hungry elementary school kid. But while inexpensive Windows tablets are all the rage this holiday season, the old adage bears repeating: You get what you pay for. We'll give a lot of leeway to a tablet this affordable, but a lot of corners are cut to deliver this low price. That said, the Nextbook 8 offers some great extras, like 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive storage and a year of Office 365, but it also comes with some pretty severe limitations. The Editors' Choice Asus VivoTab Note 8 may be more expensive, but it's a much more usable tablet.

Design
The Nextbook 8 is just the right size to use with one or two hands, provides significantly more screen space than your phone, and slips easily into a large pocket to take on the go. Measuring 0.35 by 4.84 by 8.46 inches (HWD) and 0.82 pounds, the compact tablet is roughly the same size as the Toshiba Encore and the Asus VivoTab Note 8.

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The 8-inch display covers the front of the tablet, but offers only five points of touch and a basic 1,280-by-800 resolution. This is common in lower-priced systems, but the quality (or lack thereof) is very noticeable, especially when compared with the In-Plane Switching (IPS) displays of the Asus VivoTab Note 8 and the Acer Iconia W4-820-2466. The panel itself suffers from severely limited viewing angles in any direction, with dramatic color distortion and negative effects when viewed from only a few inches off-center. The built-in speakers are too quiet to hear at low volume and don't sound good at higher volumes. You'll do far better with a pair of headphones.

The built-in cameras are similarly low quality. The rear-facing, 8 megapixel camera will do fine with basic snapshots, but colors are off (bright colors look very muted, and white objects took on a decidedly yellow tint in my testing). And you'll need to watch out for bright lights and dark shadows, since the camera doesn't handle dynamic contrast very well. The front-facing, 2-megapixel camera is more of a problem. The automatic brightness adjustment is dismal, and the limited viewing angles of the display combine to make a halfway-decent shot for a basic Skype call nearly impossible.

The 8-inch size works well for a tablet. I could easily use it with one hand, while still being able to scroll through apps using just my thumb. With two hands, typing is easy with the on-screen keyboard , and it's simple to hold the tablet in one hand and navigate apps and menus with the other. The tablet is meant to be held in Portrait orientation, putting the built-in webcam at the top of the display, but it also works just as well in a horizontal Landscape orientation. On the right-hand side of the chassis are physical buttons for Power, Volume Up/Down, and a physical Windows button instead of the touch-sensitive Windows logo seen on other tablets.

Features
Port selection is sparse, with only a few connections offered, all found on the top edge of the tablet. There are connectors for Micro USB (which doubles as a power connector), Micro HDMI-out, a microSD card slot, and a headset jack. The microSD slot lets you add up to 64GB of storage, which you'll want to take advantage of, since the tablet itself has only 16GB of onboard storage, and most of that is filled by the operating system and software. Compared with the 32GB that comes standard with the Lenovo Miix 2 8 and the 64GB of the Acer Iconia W4-820-2466, this is quite small. As of this writing, E-Fun also includes a free 16GB microSD card with each tablet, effectively doubling the storage size. This limited time offer is set to end December 31st.