To counter this, Chinese manufacturers try to imitate their Western companies, but usually skimp on the crucial aspects of design, user experience and quality control. Therefore Chinese-designed and manufactured products look and feel cheap and are impossible to fathom for people outside their country.When Google created Android and allowed companies to use it without paying a cent (Google earns its revenue by gaining clients using its services) it kind of levelled the playing field on one aspect at least – software. Hunt around all the cheap-Chinese-goods-stores all over the Internet and you will find hundreds of phones and tablets at a fraction of the price of what you’d pay on this side of the world.

There are drawbacks: if you are in the EU you will have to pay VAT on top of the price you see. You also have to wait for ages for the product to arrive unless you choose to pay extra for shipping.

I recently decided to try one of these products – the Ainol Novo 7 Paladin (aka Ainovo 7 Paladin). It is the first tablet to be released with Android 4.0 (which is known as Ice Cream sandwich/ICS). Buying it was an easy decision for two main reasons which were facilitated by a third. The first reason is that I’ve always been very curious about the quality of these Chinese products, the second is that I wanted to have one to be able to review it. The third? Well, I paid just under €120 (about $150) for it in all, 35% of which was what I paid extra to have it shipped quickly and VAT.

It arrived in Malta in a few days. It was packed in a nice, matte-laminated box with slightly too much Chinese on it. There were some Roman characters on the outside, but my apprehension grew when I saw that the manual was all in Chinese. Physically the Paladin won’t be winning any beauty competitions. It looks OK, but feels like my ‘90s Casio calculator. The buttons are hard-edged and it has no camera or HDMI output.On booting it the first time I found that most of the applications were very Chinese indeed. It took me about thirty minutes of uninstalling apps and switching settings to bring it to near-normality. Once I arrived there, though, I could appreciate the native ICS experience is truly a step forward from the Samsung-dressed up Android 2.3 I have on my Galaxy S2.

Once you start digging deeper, though, you start finding flaws. First of all under the hood the Paladin is more like a meek peasant living in a hut. It is slow to react and takes ages to load apps and web pages. Scrolling is not exactly smooth and therefore the overall experience suffers.

The screen is capacitive and has a decent resolution, but the viewing angle is terribly narrow, both vertically and horizontally. When you look at it from straight on it is great, but forget watching a movie, or even a video clip, with a friend.

The other major flaw is that most app developers optimize their apps for the ARM processors, but this uses a MIPS processor. It is fast when you have software which works well on it, but many apps in the store just won’t load.

A couple of weeks after receiving the tablet I tried playing Spider Man – a Gameloft game that came pre-installed with it. I was shocked – it ran beautifully. The graphics rendered well and flowed smoothly. It was perfect. Why doesn’t other software run like that? My guess is that when it has the right software this can be a little gem, but sadly there isn’t half enough software built for it.

Well I can hardly recommend it with a straight face. To be fair to it, most of its flaws can be excused when you look at the price. Especially if you do not have to pay VAT on it and are prepared to wait for the slow shipping option, you can lay your mitts on it for just over $100 (with free shipping from Pandawill.com, which is where I bought mine from). Then again now you can find quite a few other ICS tablets for $20 – $40 more, so you might be better off spending your cash on a tablet that can, at the very least, run more software.