The good:
1. Great build quality.
2. Clear and sharp display.
3. Quad speakers.
4. Solid performance.
5. MicroSD card support.
6. 4G and Phone functions.
The bad:
1. No fingerprint reader.
2. Sub-par battery life and charging speed
3. Slow storage.
After many years of market shrinking, we’ve finally seen a solid 26% increase in shipment of tablets in 2020. Alldocube, a Chinese company well-known for making affordable Android slates, has released quite a number of models last year. The Alldocube iPlay 40 is the latest addition to their lineup, and may very well be the best yet.
Main Specs
Operating system: Android 10.0
Screen: 10.4-inch In-Cell IPS display *1200px
Processor: Unisoc T618
CPU: Octa-Core (4*Cortex [email protected] + 6*Cortex [email protected]), 12nm process
GPU: Mali-G52MP
RAM: 8GB LPDDR4
ROM: 128GB eMMc 5.1 (supports expansion up to 2TB)
Battery: 3.8V/6000mAh Li-Po battery
Cameras: 5MP front / 8MP main
Speakers: Quad speakers
Wi-Fi: 802.11a/b/g/n, 5GHz/2.4GHz dual-band
Mobile networks: 4G (FDD-LTE/TDD-LTE), 3G (TD-SCDMA/WCDMA), 2G (GSM)
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 5.0
Ports: USB-C port, MicroSD card slot, SIM card slot
Buttons: Power/standby key, volume rocker
Size: 248.1*157.86*8.2mm, Weight: 475g
Nice-looking design and great build quality
The Alldocube iPlay 40 looks neat and elegant. The curved sides give the slate an air of luxury. The bezels around the screen are quite small, but enough for us to avoid accidental touches while gripping and holding the tablet. No, it won’t match the amazing designs of the Apple iPad Pro or the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+, but for a budget tablet, it is still very nice. A front-facing camera can be found above the display (in vertical mode), the rest of the front looks clean, and you won’t even find any branding.
The tablet has a back side made of glass fiber, which looks like metal, but feels much smoother in hand.
Apart from the model name, the camera and LED flash besides it are the only distraction. The entire backside of the tablet looks clean, simple and stylish, and gives the tablet a much more premium look than the price tag suggests.
Quad speakers are no longer a luxury only high-end tablets can afford to have. When holding the iPlay 40 horizontally, the left and right side are each home to two speakers. There’s also a Type-C port on the left side of the slate.
The tablet supports 4G, as well as storage expansion. The SIM card tray is able to carry 2 nano SIM cards or the combination of 1 nano SIM card and a MicroSD card.
There are two physical buttons on the top side of the slate: a power/standby key and a volume rocker.
The iPlay 40 measures 2248.1*157.86*8.2mm, and weighs 475g. It does not fit in our hands as well as those 8-inchers do, and you can basically forget about one-handed use, but the device didn’t burden our hands too much, either, thanks to the slim and lightweight build. As thin as it is, the iPlay 40 still feels quite robust, even physically twisting the tablet doesn’t reveal excess movement. The overall build quality of this slate is as good as that of the Lenovo Tab P11, which many consider to be the best budget tablet to date.
One thing that does bother me is the absence of a fingerprint reader, which could have made unlocking the screen a lot easier. Fortunately, the iPlay 40 supports 2D face unlock, which isn’t as secure as fingerprint, but almost as convenient.
Decent screen and sound
The Alldocube iPlay 40 sports a gorgeous 10.4-inch IPS display. Resolution clocks in at 2,000 by 1,200, for 225 pixels per inch. With deep blacks and rich colors, the display is really a joy to look at. Color accuracy is also good, and the screen is bright enough to use in any scenario.
The iPlay 40’s display uses the standard sRGBW matrix, sharpness is good and, while I don’t think color calibration or the screen architecture match the AMOLED display found on Alldocube’s X Neo, or the OLED panel on Lenovo’s Tab P11 Pro, this is still one of the better screens you’ll find on a budget tablet. When compared to the Lenovo Tab P11’s 11-inch LCD panel, the iPlay 40’s screen is much brighter.
The UI also allows users to adjust color temperature of the display to get the best visual experience.
Not just videos and photos look nice. The lightweight nature means it’s also an excellent ebook reader alternative, I changed the background color to a paper-like tone, it didn’t tire my eyes.
As mentioned earlier, the Alldocube iPlay 40 offers 4 side-firing speakers, which can go very loud. Although these built-in speakers can sound a little harsh at the highest volume, and lacks the bass and soundstage produced by the Quad JBL tuned speakers found on the Lenovo Tab P11 Pro. Still, they are much better than similarly priced Android slates and are definitely good enough for YouTube and Tik Tok.
Unfortunately, the iPlay 40 doesn’t come with 3.5mm audio jack like Alldocube’s previous models. You will need to use a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter if you want wired headphones, but who doesn’t own a pair of wireless headphones in this era?
Improved UI
The iPlay 40 runs on Alldocube’s new customized skin on top of Android 10.
Although Alldocube made a huge deal about this new UI in their ads, I personally haven’t found any significant improvement over stock Android besides features such as better-looking icons, gesture controls and smart motions, features we have seen on mainstream tablets for years. With that said, I still think it’s an important step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the Android ecosystem is going towards a direction which is less and less tablet-friendly. Many of the customized tablet applications in Play Store were released years ago and haven’t been updated for a long time. As a result, most of the apps we tried on the iPlay 40 were just phone apps blown up to fill the 10.4-inch screen, with the majority of them only supporting vertical mode. The ideal solution would be something like Samsung’s Dex Mode or Lenovo’s productivity mode, but Alldocube, as expected, doesn’t offer similar features in their slates.
Solid performance
The Alldocube iPlay 40 is powered by Unisoc’s T618 processor, which has an octa-core CPU (2 Cores of Cortex-A75 clocked at 2.0GHz and 6 cores of Cortex-A55 clocked at 2.0GHz) and ARM’s Mali-G52MP GPU.
This chipset was released in 2020 and built on 12nm process, so it is relatively new, and it offers better performance than MediaTek’s P60 or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 66X, which are the most commonly used SoC. In budget and midrange tablets. There’s also 8GB LPDDR4 RAM inside the slate to handle multitasking.
The iPlay 40 has easily beaten other budget tablets in Antutu and Geekbench 5. Even the Teclast M40, which is powered by the same Unisoc T618 chipset, scored significantly lower than the iPlay 40 in both tests.
In the GPU-focused 3DMark Slingshot Extreme test, the iPlay 40 was also returned with decent scores.
The storage inside of the iPlay 40 is relatively slow. The Sequential Read speed is only 106.27mb/s in Androbench’s readings, falling behind most other entry-level tablets including Alldocube’s very own iPlay 30, which was released three months ago. But in comparison, Teclast uses even lower-quality storage in both of their M40 and P20HD.
In the real-world use, the Unisoc T618 processor actually offers more than enough horsepower to drive the tablet for the tasks it is intended for. The iPlay 40 is smooth and responsive most of the time, I had no issues watching 4K YouTube videos in Chrome, with many other image-heavy webpages loading at the same time. The slate is also capable of keeping many big applications running in the background, thanks to its whooping 8GB RAM.
However, the iPlay 40 isn’t the best video decoder, as it scored only 827 in Antutu video tester, but for those normal video formats, you always have the choice to use software decoding. I’ve tried many clips and the slate can play all of them smoothly.
Gaming should not be your main reason to buy a tablet. With that said, the iPlay 40 can run most games installed from Play Store without issues. I tried Asphalt 9, PUBG and Arena of Valor, all of them can run smoothly at moderate settings.
Superb connectivity
The iPlay 40 supports dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, 4G and full phone functionalities. It won’t have fancy features like 5G and WiFi-6, but we don’t expect it to.
The 128GB internal storage should be sufficient for most users. For those who need more, the tablet supports a TF card of up to 2TB!
Basic cameras
There are two cameras on the iPlay 40, a front-facing 5MP camera and an 8MP main camera. Those cameras can be useful for unlocking, video-chatting, and scanning QR code, but you won’t want to “archive your life” with them. Even in perfectly-lit conditions, most photos I took with the main camera were either over-exposed or under-exposed, and there wasn’t much life to them. In low light, the photos were simply horrible. In an era when most entry-level smartphones come with dual or triple camera setups, there is really no place for tablet photography.
Subpar battery life and charging speed
The Alldocube iPlay 40 houses a 6000mAh Li-Po battery, smaller than the capacity of most of its peers. Even with a more power-efficient processor, the iPlay 40 still only gives me around 7 hours’ screen time on a full charge.
With display brightness and speaker volume both set at 50%, the iplay 40 lasted 7 hours and 55 minutes in our battery rundown test, where we played a 1080P video on loop.
This iPlay 40 doesn’t support any form of quick charge. The supplied wall charger is rated 10W (5V-2A), a full charge (0%?100%) takes about 4 hours. In comparison, the Lenovo Tab P11 comes with a 20W QC3.0 charger, while the Smasung Galaxy Tab A7 supports 15W charging.
Verdict: an all-around tablet with some minor compromises
The Alldocube iPlay 40 isn’t designed to break any new grounds, but it is an Android tablet which gets a lot of essential things right. It has a sharp and colorful display, which makes it ideral for video streaming, web-browsing and even light gaming. The T618 processor offers more than enough power for everyday tasks. 4G and phone functionalities means the tablet can be a serviceable phone whenever needed.
The absence of a fingerprint reader, slow storage and low battery capacity could all be potential deal breakers for many, but for a tablet priced as low as the iPlay 40, it’s really unfair to ask for perfection. With UFS 2.1 storage, higher quality speakers and much, much better cameras, the Lenovo Tab P11 is still a superior piece of tech in many aspects. But if horsepower is on top of your priorities when choosing a tablet, you won’t get anything better than the iPlay 40 in the same price range.
