Velocity Micro is known for well-priced, high-performing PCs, so I understand why the company would want to apply that ethos of craftsmanship and quality to tablets. Unfortunately, the Velocity Micro Cruz T408 ($199.99 direct) suffers from the same problems that plague most discount tablets: an awful screen, an OS designed for phones, and a lack of the Google apps that most people expect from Android devices. While the Cruz T408 performs well, it's too user-unfriendly for the masses.

Design
The Cruz T408 is an 8.5 by 6.5 by 4-inch, one-pound black plastic slab like most budget tablets, but there's a bit more care in the workmanship than you see on, say, the Pandigital SuperNova ($229, 2.5 stars). The front is glossy black, while the back is a nice soft-touch material. The Cruz has Power and Volume buttons on the side, but there are no physical buttons on the front of the tablet. Instead, Velocity Micro has hacked Android 2.3 to include the on-screen Home and Back buttons from Honeycomb.

But oh, that screen. Turn on the Cruz T408 and like with other tablets in its price range, prepare to feel sad. The dim, grainy, 8-inch 800-by-600 panel is better than some others—at least it has a viewing angle—but it has an icky effect that makes it look like it's covered with cheap contact paper, like many displays of its class do. If a screen is a tablet's window to the world, it's a pity Velocity Micro chose such a poor pane.

Android OS and Apps
The tablet runs a moderately hacked version of Android 2.3, and if you want to hack it further, Velocity Micro says go ahead. There's no Android Market, Gmail, or Maps here, but you do get the Amazon AppStore and some other default apps, including Kindle, checkers and chess games, Quickoffice, a file manager, and Napster. That at least shows Velocity Micro is thinking about how to app this thing up. An Ice Cream Sandwich OS upgrade will come too, if Google makes that possible.

The tablet has surprisingly good performance considering its 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor, the same processor used in Samsung's first-generation Galaxy S phones. Velocity Micro gets points for tuning the system so benchmarks and other apps punch a bit above their weight, and Flash performance is especially good. I had no problem playing Flash games on Kongregate, for instance. YouTube videos played in HD, but with a lot of buffering. 

I'm a bit concerned about the Cruz's Wi-Fi. The Cruz dropped our office Wi-Fi networks a few times, which was frustrating. The tablet scored 7 hours, 34 minutes on our video playback battery test, which is fine for a tablet of this size and class. The battery isn't removable.

Multimedia and Conclusions
An adequate multimedia tablet, the Cruz T408 played MPEG4 and H.264 video files up to 1080p without a problem in our tests, and as I said earlier, it does well with Flash video. It also plays all the usual music formats, whether through its own tinny speaker or through wired or Bluetooth headphones. The T408 doesn't have an HDMI output jack, though, so you can't play your videos on a TV, unlike the competing Pandigital SuperNova .

The single, front-facing camera is designed for video chatting, and it records video at a decent clip, with 640-by-480 resolution at 24 frames per second. But still images are dim and blurry, and only VGA quality. You get 4GB of built-in memory and a microSD card slot; our 64GB SanDisk card worked fine. 

The Velocity Micro Cruz T408 is in the top rank of cheap Android tablets, but we still don't recommend it. Yes, it's $199, but the compromises that need to be made to produce a (non-Amazon) tablet at this price are just too great. 

The screen is grainy and low-res, and the OS is a non-Google-approved version of Android 2.3. If you're the kind of person who rolls your own tablet OS, the Cruz has decent bones and would make a good project, but Velocity Micro doesn't offer the software support to replace Google's services on its own.

We've seen this over and over again, on tablets like the Coby Kyros ($199, 2 stars), the Vizio VTAB1008 ($289, 2.5 stars), and the Pandigital SuperNova ($229, 2 stars). Bringing the price down this low means using a dim screen panel and cutting yourself off from the main wealth of Google Android apps.

If you're looking for a $199 tablet, it's worth waiting to see if the Amazon Kindle Fire, with its far superior screen, fits your bill. Otherwise, the HTC Flyer ($299.99 street, 3.5 stars) runs a fully Google-approved version of Android with some sexy HTC extensions, but even that is still using an OS designed for smaller phone screens. Our current pick for small tablets is the Acer Iconia Tab A100 ($329, 4 stars), which has a better screen, processor, and OS for a much more satisfying experience. It isn't as cheap, but you get a lot more for your money. The investment is worth it.

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