Last Updated on January 5, 2013 by Dave Farquhar
I had a chance to take a look at the Insignia Flex tablet, Best Buy’s $249 house-brand Android tablet. If you need a basic dual-core tablet that’s reasonably well-built, it’s not bad. I found it responsive and usable–there just wasn’t anything flashy about it. The two things I found I didn’t like were that the settings control panel didn’t let you change much, and it has a 4:3-perspective 1024×768 screen, which is unusual in this world of 16:9 tablets. I’m afraid the old-school resolution might eventually be a problem. And there’s no Cyanogenmod 9 or 10 for it.
But if you need a value tablet in the 9-10 inch range, I have a suggestion for you.
It turns out this tablet is made by a company called Matsunichi, which has been marketing very similar tablets under the Le Pan name. The Insignia Flex fits in between two Le Pan models. The Le Pan S sports the same 1 GHz clock rate but only 4 GB of storage to the Flex’s 8 GB, while the Le Pan II pairs 8 GB of storage with a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon CPU.
The Le Pan S costs under $200, while the Le Pan II costs around $249. I think the Le Pan II is a better value than the Insignia Flex, since it’s 20% faster.
At less than $200–it’s $179 as I write–I might be more inclined to take the Le Pan S as it is. After all, it’s a 9.7-inch tablet in the same price range as a good 7-inch tablet.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.