If not for the EAFT Destiny D90T’s underwhelming touchscreen, we would recommend it hands down. It has a good display as well as speakers and some impressive power under the hood. It almost gives premium tablets a run for their money. Unfortunately, the touchscreen is where this device suffers the most and that is where it loses out. There are tablets available in the market that are decent performers and offer a better touchscreen experience even if it is at a smaller display size. But if a 10-inch tablet is what you are looking for, then you could check out the Zync Z1000, Karbonn Smart Tab 10 or the Spice Stellar Pad before making your purchase decision.
Some budget tablets that have impressed us include the WickedLeak Wammy Desire, Spice Stellar Pad Mi-1010, and the iberry Auxus CoreX2 3G. Today, we have another addition to the budget tablet portfolio the Destiny D90T. A company called EAFT Technologies makes the tablet. The tablet on the other hand boasts of some impressive specifications under the hood. Is it enough to help the Destiny D90T rise above the competition?
Design and Build
As we have seen with the budget phablets, to be one of the best, it makes sense to copy the market leader. In this case, the Destiny D90T takes its design cues from the Samsung Galaxy Note 800. The rear of the device has a similar white and silver plastic finish. A majority of the back of the device is white with a glossy finish making it a fingerprint and dust magnet. There is a silver strip on the top, which houses the 2MP camera. A similar silver strip rests at the bottom of the rear panel.
The front of the Destiny D90T has a 9.7-inch display keeping it at par with the iPad in terms of the display size. The front of the device too has a 2MP camera for video calling. There are no physical buttons on the face of the device giving it a clean look.
All the ports are neatly laid out on one side. We have the DC in, headphones jack, micro USB port, microSD card slot, HDMI out, mic and the volume rocker. Rather than being a rocker it feels like there are two separate buttons to control the volume and that is a good thing.
The Destiny D90T’s power button on the other hand rests on the top of the device (held in landscape mode). The tablet isn’t particularly light at 609 grams but is comfortable to hold and use in both landscape and portrait mode for prolonged hours.
The display has a 4:3 resolution, which means that you will lose a lot of screen real estate while watching videos. The overall design of the EAFT Destiny D90T is quite good. Even though this is a budget tablet, it is built quite well, better than the Zync Z1000.
Features and Specifications
Straight out of the box, the EAFT Destiny D90T runs on Android 4.0.4 ICS and there is no information on whether the tablet will receive the 4.1 Jelly Bean update. It’s a little disappointing to see the device run on Android 4.0 when budget tablets have launched that run JB straight out of the box. (You can check out 6 budget tablets running JB here).
For the most part, the UI of the EAFT Destiny D90T is stock Android with a minimalistic skin that won’t make a difference to most users. The tablet doesn’t come preloaded with a bunch of apps, but you do have access to the Play store to satisfy your app needs.
The EAFT Destiny D90T doesn’t house a SIM card slot but you can connect a USB dongle to connect to the Internet on the go. As far as the specifications are concerned, the Destiny D90T has a 1.6GHz dual-core Cortex A9 processor along with 1GB of RAM. The 9.7-inch display has a resolution of 1024×768, which is the same one we saw on the Zync Z1000. It has the Mali 400 GPU and a whopping 8000mAh battery.
On paper, the EAFT Destiny D90T seems to be quite impressive but does this translate into real world performance?
Performance
Let us get the worst out of the way. The touchscreen isn’t smooth. It feels rough and quite uncomfortable to navigate. This translates into the keyboard as well. The keyboard isn’t the most comfortable to type on. Don’t expect to type your next document on this device.
The resolution of the display on the EAFT Destiny D90T is 1024×768 pixels. The resolution is the same as the Zync Z1000, but the panel here is IPS, giving good viewing angles as well as some great colour representation. Watching videos on the device was quite a treat and the on-board speakers are quite loud. It’s a treat to watch videos on the device. The only downside here is that the aspect ratio of the display is 4:3 which means that there are thick black bars at the top and the bottom of the screen making it a waste of screen space. But then again we don’t think this is a major complaint since most of the 10-inch tablets suffer from the same problem.
Browsing the web or rather reading text is a treat on the device. The display is big, vibrant and the text looks good and very well readable. The only hindrance is the lacklustre nature of the touchscreen.
The overall performance of the device is average. It is plagued with the occasional lag but not as much as we have seen on some other tablets. The hardware under the hood is good and Dead Trigger ran and loaded swiftly with the occasional frame rate drop and lag. The only downside to the game was (and we are saying it again), the touch screen. It totally destroyed the experience of the game.
Apart from Dead Trigger, all the other games we played on the device such as Angry Birds Star Wars, Subway Surf and more ran quite smoothly with the only downer being the controls.
We were really shocked to see the benchmark scores of the device. We will let you see them for yourself.
Yes, the other two tablets that we are comparing this device to aren’t budget devices. The EAFT Destiny D90T scores between the Samsung Galaxy Note 800 and the Asus Transformer Prime. It is shocking and we did run the benchmarks more than once to reconfirm the scores. Considering the other devices run on a quad-core processor and the Destiny D90T runs on a dual-core processor, this is quite shocking.
Data transfer from Mac or PC to the EAFT Destiny D90T is simple drag and drop. A whopping 8000mAh battery powers the tablet, making it quit a performer. In the continuous video playback test, it lasted for a whopping 7.5 hours. That is truly impressive. The location services were on, brightness was on full and so was the volume. The battery on the device is very impressive.
Bottom Line
If it were not for the underwhelming touchscreen we would recommend the EAFT Destiny D90T hands down. It has a good display as well as speakers and some impressive power under the hood. It almost gives premium tablets a run for their money. Unfortunately, the touchscreen is where this device suffers the most and that is where it loses out. There are tablets available in the market that are decent performers and offer a better touchscreen experience even if it is at a smaller display size. But if a 10-inch tablet is what you are looking for, then you could check out the Zync Z1000, Karbonn Smart Tab 10 or the Spice Stellar Pad before making your purchase decision.
