Mobile Android Entertainment System

If you're looking for a really cheap way to get into Android gaming this is a great product, just remember...you get what you pay for.They claim that since this is built specifically for gaming that it's a faster gaming experience than playing on a phone but that has proven false for me. I have a 2 year old Droid phone and all the games on it run much faster and smoother than on the PlayMG. The PlayMG loads games slower and features way more stutter than I've ever seen on the phone.The touch screen is pretty poor. One side is very unresponsive. Games where you need to "pop" things to earn points very quickly end up being harder than they need to be or impossible because when things pop on the unresponsive side you have to tap them 5 or 6 times or push really hard and you still miss them most of the time. Other games end up being hard or impossible because they have things you need to touch around the edges of the screen and on the PlayMG it's very difficult to touch anything along the edges. Even Angry Birds is difficult because as you try to pull your slingshot thingie back, the PlayMG will stop recognizing your touch and fire before you want to, leading your bird to just dribble forward 2 feet.Battery life is terrible. Once again the 2 year old Droid phone I have will play games for hours without needing a charge. The PlayMG lasts an hour to 90 minutes at most. My unit spends more time on the charger or laying dead on the table than it does playing games.The built in Wifi is by far the most annoying thing. It loses connection every 5-10 minutes. Every single time it goes to sleep, the connection goes off. Play a game, exit the game, you no longer have connection. Set the thing down to download updates from the app store, you'll only end up with half them. I am constantly having to go into settings and turn WiFi off and back on to get it to work.If you're poor like me and can deal with these nagging issues, it's a decent product. For a kid that doesn't know any better, it's a nice buy. But if you can buy a decent Droid smartphone instead, that's still the way to go.

My 9 year old son has very much enjoyed the MG -- it certainly has frozen a few times, and the online support at the manufacturer's site was very helpful in showing how to deal with it. Unlike other machines, this works more like a phone and so requires certain behaviors (using back key to stop apps, for instance) in order to keep it from crashing. My son can now unfreeze it on his own, has learned how to keep it charged, and is getting a handle on dealing with updates and such. Having the whole Android app universe open to him has been a blast. He received a google play card from his uncle, so was able to add $25 for those apps he wanted to pay for. He does not seem frustrated by any of the idiosyncrasies involved -- just accepts them as part of using this device.As for me, I will happily let him pay for apps he wants by using google play cards (he is accustomed to having to pay for his virtual purchases -- I still cannot quite wrap my mind around paying real money for non-real items:-))! But I just canceled the BillMyParents gig. First, "registering" was not nearly as straightforward as the fancy advert that came with the game made it sound. The card that comes with is NOT pre-equipped for fast loading; it is a dummy credit card to add pizzazz. Parents will have to go to the billmyparents site, register, use their own credit card to open an account, then wait for the real card to be MAILED to the house -- you have to get the real item for any of the electronic services associated with it to work. It is just a prepaid debit card -- not dedicated to the machine, which for some reason (the ads perhaps?) was the impression I had. So, I went through the registration process, activated the card when it arrived, and tried several times to actually get it the account really set up, all to no avail. Billmyparents had no problem taking my $$ (it is being refunded), but couldn't manage to get the account up and running. This is not Amazon's fault, but it does make me wonder about the MG manufacturers. The real problem for me, though, were all the hidden fees associated with the card! $3.95 a month just to have the thing -- doesn't matter whether it's being used or not. Then, there are fees associated with loading the card, unless you directly debit from a checking account. All in all, I find the name "Bill my Parents" to be quite accurate. I canceled the account and cut up the card.