ASUS MeMO Pad HD7 Review: $149 Nexus 7.1 Successor & Our First Look at MediaTek's MT8125

NAND, WiFi & Camera Performance

My MeMO Pad HD7 review sample included a 16GB SK Hynix eNAND eMMC 4.41 solution on-board. Internally there are two 64Gbit NAND die (2y nm class, 20 - 30nm), likely 2bpc MLC given Hynix's position on waiting for TLC until the 1y-nm node.

The eMMC is new enough to support TRIM, however the MeMO Pad HD7 ships with Android 4.2.2 which doesn't include support for fstrim. Presumably once the HD7 gets updated to Android 4.3 we'll see fstrim enabled as the hardware should support it. We really need to see better eMMC solutions focusing on improving random write performance. Even when constrained to a 100MB space the random write performance of pretty much every modern Android device is horrible at best. And what you're looking at here is best case performance. Fill the eMMC and you'll see significantly worse performance over time. The only recommendation I can offer is to keep at least 25% of your internal storage free. I haven't done much digging to see how these bargain basement eMMC solutions behave over time when given tons of spare area, so it's possible that the 25% recommendation may not be enough. I've started some experimentation with the Nexus 7 and I hope to have something to report in the not too distant future.

Quite possibly the biggest tradeoff/drawback, the MeMO Pad HD7 only features a single antenna 2.4GHz 802.11n WiFi solution. WiFi is provided courtesy of MediaTek's own MT6628 WiFi/BT/GPS/FM combo chip.

Its peak performance is actually really good though:

Although GPS is supported by the MT6628, GPS isn't enabled on the HD7. Update: I was very wrong here. GPS is supported and enabled on the MeMO Pad HD7. Sorry!

The 5MP rear facing camera is a nice addition over the original Nexus 7. Image quality is reasonable in a pinch. ASUS' camera UI is nice and quick, with a high framerate downsampled preview. As always, toss enough light on the subject and the results can be pretty decent:

I threw some sample images in the gallery below. Video is encoded at 17Mbps H.264 main profile.