Sumas 10″ Tablet Review: This Tablet is Hard to Swallow

I went to a local Fry’s to purchase a relatively inexpensive tablet for a Christmas gift. After looking at all the options and talking to the associate, who seemed to know what he was talking about, I opted to pick up the Sumas 10.1-inch tablet, the PC SMT-102PAD. In fact, I bought two of them as gifts. My girlfriend picked up one for herself. At $179 each, the 10-inch screen and 1ghz processor seemed like a perfect gift for that price range. There wasn’t a demo for that particular model, but the other comparable tablets seemed to be sufficient.

So we walked out of the store with three of these tablets in hand… and wound up back at the store less than 24 hours later returning all three of them. So what were the big issues?

Touch Screen
After plugging it in and powering it up, the first sign of a problem appeared when I merely tried unlocking the screen. Simply sliding the “lock” icon ended up being a battle as the screen was unresponsive and required my pushing much harder than I’ve come to expect with other Android touch screens. After getting it unlocked, I wanted to get on the web right away, so I attempted to enter in the password to my router. It was two four-letter words, and took me about 3 minutes to enter. This was after I calibrated the screen. Almost every time I tried to type a letter, I would get two letters or the wrong letter. And I had to press quite hard to get them to appear.

Wi-Fi? No dice.
Once the labor of entering my password was complete, it was time to connect to the internet. I tried this with all three tablets, each with different results. Tablet 1 connected with little problem, Tablet 2 recognized my router but never connected to it, while Tablet 3 didn’t see my router or any other WiFi connection in my area.  They were all set up identically. 1 worked, 2 didn’t.

Power on, Power off.
Tablet 1, after about 20 minutes of use, just shut off and never came back on. It was fully charged and we went through the manual for ideas. Nothing worked.

Got Chinese?
One of the three tablets came out of the box speaking Chinese. If I didn’t have the other tablets to look at for reference, I wouldn’t have known how to change it back to English.

Bottom Line
Within an hour of returning home with these three tablets, my girlfriend and I felt ripped off. I might expect a $40 tablet from Big Lots to act like this, but this was as much as a Wii and complete junk. When I returned the tablet, a salesman in the electronics department told me those have massive return rates and he advises customers not to buy them.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive tablet and see one of these displayed, do yourself a favor and run screaming into the night in fear.

Fry’s, do your customers a favor and dump the Sumas tablets from your inventory. In fact, shame on Fry’s for stocking such a steaming pile of garbage and tacking on such a price tag. How many returns do you need to get before you take a second look at the items you sell? It looks bad on Fry’s to have their own associates telling customers that an item they carry is a bad deal.

So if you’ve read this far and still want to purchase a Sumas tablet… you have been warned.

Sumas 10″ Tablet product info