Murena /e/OS Tablet Review: Secrets on the Price

Inside the Volla is an Octa-core processor, the MediaTek Helio G99—which, while not the fastest, was very fast for browsing and watching 4K video. The only place where I can see this chip as a limitation is gaming. Therefore, you may want something more powerful.

Along with the processor you get 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage space. There are no additional options, and disappointingly there is no microSD card slot for additional storage. There is a sim card slot, however, and I was able to use the tablet on the T-Mobile network without any problems.

The /e/OS version sent by Volla is based on Android 14, which is a little behind at the moment, but it is the release that saw Google finally adding a few features that make it easier for developers to create apps for large screens. Any applications using this feature should work fine on /e/OS.

For its part, Murena hasn’t added any tablet features to /e/OS, the way Samsung and OnePlus have developed UIs for their tablets. You get the stock Android 14 interface in the form of split screen mode, but that’s what the tablet mode is all about. The main interesting thing is, looking at privacy / e/OS and the lack of Google Services installed on Volla. Instead, you get Murena services (optional), or you can do what I do and use your own websites (a mix of Syncthing and NextCloud and other issues). In any case, you start without Google.

Photo: Scott Gilbertson

This means that there may be problems with the software. As I said in my review of /e/OSsome banking apps in particular seem to have issues with microG, which /e/OS uses instead of Google’s various APIs and tools. On this tablet, I encountered another problem that may be microG related (although it may also be hardware related).