There are a few standouts here. The best point is the R3,000 price, which nets you the other two: an 8,000mAh battery and an 11in display. If you knew nothing else about the Volkano Cosmic tablet, that would be enough. Unless you were determined to play games or replace your laptop with this surprisingly value-conscious slate. Don't do that. It's not built that way. Go forth and switch your brain off instead.
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Design
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Display
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Performance
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Battery
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Value
If you’re anything like us, tablets are a good idea in principle, but actually finding a use for one is tough. Volkano’s Cosmic 11in tablet, based on its price and specs, immediately suggests the same usage every other tablet eventually gets used for: entertainment.
A very specific kind of entertainment, in our case, but you could go the streaming media route too. But comic books and graphic novels are ideally suited for the 11in display on this R3,000 tablet. You’re getting a lot of screen for your money. Might as well use it to read very small text, right?
Boxing champ
The Volkano Cosmic tablet (there are other products in the Cosmic lineup that aren’t… well, tablets) arrives in a substantial box. It’s larger than we’re used to seeing for any tablet, and Volkano certainly could have made it smaller. But it does ship with everything you need.
There’s the tablet itself — we’d be annoyed if it wasn’t there — along with a charge block and cable. There’s also a secondary box with a full tablet cover included. It’s handy for a couple of reasons — immediate protection, plus it saves the guesswork of finding which generic cover you’ve got to buy to encase the (amazingly) metal-backed slate in protective plastic. It’s not like Volkano has a massive presence overseas. A screen protector is also applied to the tablet at some point before it’s stuffed into its box.
The tablet is the black-and-grey rectangle you’re expecting. Physical keys are kept to a minimum, with just the power and volume rocker present. The bottom edge has speaker grilles, the SIM tray (it’ll fit two SIM cards), and the USB-C input for charging. The top edge also features speaker grilles. The rear hosts a camera bump for the 8MP sensor, and a 5MP effort lives in the screen’s bezel.
Something inside
The Volkano Cosmic tablet’s internals are fairly agreeable, especially at this price. The 11in screen features a resolution of 1,200 x 1,920, though it’s unlikely to blow you away with its colour rendition. It’s fairly decent, but don’t go expecting high refresh rates and stellar brightness. Indoors and nighttime are where the Cosmic performs at its best. Adaptive brightness is a nice touch, something facilitated by the Android 15 OS Volkano has installed here.
The Unisoc T7255 processor is an octa-core effort. It’ll handle basic entertainment, just as it does in a range of other similarly-budget tablets. Volkano at least does us the favour of only mentioning the physical RAM included in its hardware. 6GB of system memory and 128GB of storage are enough to get by on without resorting to page files and microSD cards, but you can have both of those things if you really want to. There’s an option under System that’ll let you allocate an additional 6GB of storage as virtual RAM, but it’s turned off by default. Likewise, the SIM tray can be used for extra storage by sacrificing one of those SIM slots.
Run, Forrest, run
Performance is fair, provided you temper what you’re asking the Cosmic to do. Streaming video and swapping between PDF/CBZ pages featuring your favourite superhero? It’ll handle everything you need. Running whatever game is trending on the socials this cycle? Yeah… probably not, unless there’s a retro revival going on. Basic usage only, here, with the screen making the Volkano Cosmic a contender for your new multimedia champ.
Worth mentioning is the Android 15 installation Volkano has provided. It’s refreshingly clean, with none of the bloat we’d expect a tablet like this to feature otherwise. It’s not vanilla, but it’s certainly basic Android. Google’s apps, plus a handful of Android stalwarts, are all that you’ll find on first boot. No extra sign-ups, no shortcuts to games, just… tablet.
The less said…
The Cosmic’s C-to-C charging block will get the 8,000mAh battery up to full eventually, but it’s likely to cap out at 25W. We weren’t able to find exact details on the charging speed because… well, these things aren’t indexed everywhere, and the charge block and software aren’t very forthcoming. At least there’s plenty of battery capacity, which is what you want from an entertainment-focused device. Who wants their extended viewing of everything Chris Nolan ever made interrupted just to charge the screen they’re watching on? Exactly. Nobody.
There are also cameras to consider. Provided you only ever use them for video calls (the other thing folks love to use tablet for), you won’t have to be disappointed. Both the rear 8MP and front 5MP will snap pictures when you tell them to — following a very brief but noticeable delay — but you’re probably not going to like what comes out the other side. The Volkano Cosmic won’t displace the smaller, better camera that’s already in your pocket. We don’t make the rules. It’s just the order of the universe.
Volkano Cosmic 11in 4G LTE tablet verdict
We’ve previously recommended 7in-sized Samsung tablets at this price point quite highly. Volkano’s larger-screened effort stacks up neatly against those, with the added advantage of a considerably larger screen to play with. It’s this point especially that has us thinking of graphic novels and their lesser brethren as the main touchpoint for the Cosmic. Or you could wrack your brain trying to find yet another purpose for a tablet that doesn’t eventually devolve into ‘I’m gonna watch/read things with it’.
You know you’ll be back to that eventually, despite all your lofty ideas. At least with this one, navigating that particular closed loop won’t prove costly. At all. Seriously, Volkano, can we keep this one? Tom Orzechowski’s letters are very, very tiny on a 7in screen.
