Jexaa is a British company specializing in budget Android tablets, and as with many other budget models curently on sale, its Jexaa JexTab 812 HD doesn’t feature Honeycomb. Instead the JexTab 812 offers a tweaked version of the Android 2.3  OS, which was actually designed for smartphones.

Such a leap usually brings serious problems because smartphone graphics tend not to scale up well to the larger screen sizes of tablets, and so Android 2.3 in tablet format usually looks clumsy and badly-proportioned, and the hardware in such budget tablets is often slow. Perhaps most importantly there is often no access to the Android Market.

Not so with the Jexaa JexTab 812 HD. Its lightly-modified UI is sleek, free of any pixellation seen on other  Android 2 tablets. Thus the larger screen real estate becomes a plus, with more room on the desktop for app shortcuts and widgets to speed up your mobile computing experience. The Jexaa JexTab 812 HD is slim and light, and despite the cheap-looking glossy plastic rear panel, the front surface’s aluminium finish feels more classy.

The 8″ screen employs a capacitiative touchscreen with multitouch capabilities, and its quality is excellent- good contrast, acceptable brightness, and a fabulous 1024 x 768 resolution for such a petite screen. This traditional resolution, for years the standard in CFT displays, makes the JexTab 812 more pleasant to use in portrait orientation than in tablets with wider aspect displays.

And rather than being absent, Android Market comes pre-installed, so it’s easy to download apps and games.Flash support means more of the web is available to users to enjoy.

Although Bluetooth and GPS are absent, the JexTab 812 offers commendable connectivity: a microSD slot allows the standard 8GB storage to be expanded, and a full-sized USB socket enables syncing with either FAT32 or NTFS USB storage devices. 3G dongles can be connected for Internet access in ‘cold’ spots.

The JexTab 812 runs on  a 1.2GHz Rockchip CPU, supported by 512MB RAM, though these specs were not sufficient in all situations; for multimedia the Jex Tab 812 HD performed satisfactorily, playing music and local video at up to 1080p impeccably, and these can be outputted to an HD TV via the HDMI socket. On top of this, Angry Birds, Raging Thunder 2 and Dragon Fly! all executed flawlessly.

The Jexaa JexTab 812 HD does feature front- and rear-facing cameras, 2mp and 3mp respectively, but both produced only average-quality images.

Battery life is first-rate at more than 8 hours, and the looping video-medium brightness battery gave 9hrs 50 mins.

Browsing the Internet, unfortunately, was not very smooth. Scrolling and panning was sluggish, especially on complicated pages, although downloaded third-party browsers (we tried Dolphin HD and Opera Mini) improved matters.

Wireless connectivity on the JexTab 812 was poor – in areas with low connectivity, the JexTab 812 may well fail to establish any connection.

However, these gripes aside, the excellent screen, access to Android Market, and its gaming and media credentials all help the Jexaa JexTab 812 HD easily justify its low asking price.