China Tablets to recommend

[Teo Ming Ern]

Try a lower channel for 5ghz. Like 36

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

Oh... ok I try later... that means both my routers also must lower the channel? I think my routers are both on auto.

 

[Just Me]

Oh... ok I try later... that means both my routers also must lower the channel? I think my routers are both on auto.

Try it one router first.. my mibox international also doesn't like higher channels on my router

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

 

[Teo Ming Ern]

Try it one router first.. my mibox international also doesn't like higher channels on my router

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

I see... both my routers are identical Linksystem EA-8100 from Starhub... Wifi Analyser says my 5 GHz band is on Channel 108 & 155... probably 2 5 GHz bands from 2 different routers... cos I also see 2 2.4 GHz bands also... should see only 1 for each band right?

 

[Just Me]

I see... both my routers are identical Linksystem EA-8100 from Starhub... Wifi Analyser says my 5 GHz band is on Channel 108 & 155... probably 2 5 GHz bands from 2 different routers... cos I also see 2 2.4 GHz bands also... should see only 1 for each band right?

For two routers, there should be 2 x 2.4+5ghz bands

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

 

[magixz]

I just received the tablet... it's dual band wifi right? It doesn't detect my 5GHz band leh... I can see the 2.4 GHz out of the box though... how come? Any settings? Thanks!

I on Ch 36. 5GHz connect fine.

Sent from Xiaomi REDMI NOTE 9S using GAGT

 

[magixz]

I see... both my routers are identical Linksystem EA-8100 from Starhub... Wifi Analyser says my 5 GHz band is on Channel 108 & 155... probably 2 5 GHz bands from 2 different routers... cos I also see 2 2.4 GHz bands also... should see only 1 for each band right?

I used 1 router, 1 repeater

Sent from Xiaomi REDMI NOTE 9S using GAGT

 

[Teo Ming Ern]

Try a lower channel for 5ghz. Like 36

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

Thank you! Works like magic!

 

[Just Me]

Thank you! Works like magic!

No problem. BTW, does the OS come with system wide dark mode?

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

 

[magixz]

No problem. BTW, does the OS come with system wide dark mode?

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

I cannot comment cos I dun use it. If amoled I will use.

Sent from Xiaomi REDMI NOTE 9S using GAGT

 

[Teo Ming Ern]

No problem. BTW, does the OS come with system wide dark mode?

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

Yes it does... really good tablet for the price... not as polished visuals for the interface and animations... I think it's really stock Android 10 with just a few customizations...

 

[Pegasus]

Iplayer20 looks good. I still using Allocube T10M bought in 2016, Android 6.0. a bit sluggish due to 2GB. Screen has a few bright spots due to water seepage.
Previous tablet Teclast X98 not as good. Battery uplorry close to 2 year usage.

 

[Teo Ming Ern]

A few comments first regarding this iPlay 20:

1. 5 GHz band wifi works only on low channel numbers. I had to adjust the channel numbers (40 & 44) on both routers (Linksys EA-8100) and the tablet had no issue logging onto those 5 GHz networks and surfing speed was good. EDIT: I was able to stream videos from Dramacool website without any hiccups (less than 720p video). YouTube streamed without any hiccups, no dropped frames, very smooth and nice. Mewatch app ran flawlessly too.

2. The tablet's icons rather rather crude (white squares with the icons squashed inside) so are the animations. Or perhaps there are no animations. Is a lot less polished that Samsung's One UI... the settings are a bit scattered all over I feel... perhaps I have become too used to Samsung's interface. There doesn't seem any way to change the way the icons look short of changing the launcher.

3. System comes intact with system-wide dark mode. Also comes with Eye Comfort which basically a blue light filter. Probably native to Android 10. It gives the screen an amber tint (stated in the settings, interestingly enough)

4. Ability to stream content to TV wirelessly. I haven't tried this. Will try when I get home. EDIT: I tried casting to my Sony 42 inch TV. Result is very similar to my Samsung. I tried a Daily Motion streaming video which runs at 720p and the streaming was smooth. Then I launched YouTube and ran a video at 1080p60 and there was significant lag. Same with my Samsung Tab A. I rather suspect it is my Sony TVs - I have a 42 & 70 inch, and both are very bad with casting. I have been using Samsung Note8,, Note 9, S7 edge, S8 Plus, Tab A 10.1, Tab S2, all got problem with poor streaming and poor video quality (pixelated). So I can't really tell how good the iPlay20 is at casting.

5.The SIM tray is quite unusual. It's covered on one side with a bare metal plate. It's a hybrid dual SIM + microSD card tray. I popped in a 64 GB Sandisk Extreme card with 17 folders of photos and videos. I use Simple Gallery to view them. Caching the thumbnails quite slow. Might be card issue or might be app issue. Nevertheless, photos come out nicely.

6. Screen brightness is very low actually. In office, I am at 91% brightness. If I push the slider to 50%, the screen gets way too dim. Not sure if I getting it right. But I think the super bright setting is sucking up a lot of power. No ambient light sensor though. But screen quality is good. Won't lose out to the Samsung Tab A 10.1 2019. The Tab A is a TFT screen, this is an IPS screen. I feel the iPlay20 screen is marginally better. Need to compare side by side. EDIT: did a side by side comparison and the iPlay20 screen does actually look better although with the blue light filters on for both tablets, the iPlay20 looks much warmer. I played back a 4K YouTube video which looked fantastic on the iPlay20 screen. My parents were amazed at the quality of the screen. BTW, the video didn't run at 4K but at 1080p60. There was no option to change the resolution to 4K. 1080p60 was the maximum.

7. Notification setting is a bit dumb. You have to tap each app to change the notification profile. It's not a list of apps with the switch on the side of each line. A bit strange.

8. The wallpaper setting is also a bit strange. I tried using both a portrait and landscape photo for both the lockscreen and the home screen. The tablet is portrait oriented. But when putting in a photo, the orientation defaults to landscape. Which means if you rotate the tablet to portrait orientation, you can't see most of the photo, especially mine which has people in them. Very very weird. I don't get that with the Samsung. The UI automatically displays the central portion of the photo in portrait mode and when flipped to landscape mode, will display the full photo. I don't know if this is an issue with how Android handles photos or it's just the UI not optimized. Any ideas will be welcome! EDIT: Installing Nova launcher from Google Play Store solved this wallpaper issue. But I still can't adjust the position of the clock widget on the Lock Screen. Probably a paid feature on Nova.

9. Since the tablet is portrait oriented, there is an app dock at the bottom of the screen. You can't get rid of the dock so when you rotate the tablet to landscape mode, the dock remains on the side... so instead of two rows of apps like in the portrait mode, you get one row horizontally and the dock displayed vertically... again very weird. No setting to change that that I know of. EDIT: Again solved with Nova launcher.

10. I haven't tried the LTE function yet. Will try with TPG (data only) and Singtel (voice + data) and Starhub (data only) and report back. A dialer is included so is a contact app. So I think you can actually use this as a phone. Whatsapp and Viber are installed by default it seems. EDIT: The tablet plays nice with all my three SIM cards. So thats very good. Only 4G though. At least that is what i see on the icon in the notification bar. I don't think it supports carrier aggregation to get 4G+.

11. The USB-C port works with my Sandisk Ultra flash drive 128 GB, USB 3.0, dual connector (USB-A & USB-C). So OTG is available.

12. This is for now... will edit and update again...

 

[Just Me]

A few comments first regarding this iPlay 20:

1. 5 GHz band wifi works only on low channel numbers. I had to adjust the channel numbers (40 & 44) on both routers (Linksys EA-8100) and the tablet had no issue logging onto those 5 GHz networks and surfing speed was good.

2. The tablet's icons rather rather crude (white squares with the icons squashed inside) so are the animations. Or perhaps there are no animations. Is a lot less polished that Samsung's One UI... the settings are a bit scattered all over I feel... perhaps I have become too used to Samsung's interface. There doesn't seem any way to change the way the icons look short of changing the launcher.

3. System comes intact with system-wide dark mode. Also comes with Eye Comfort which basically a blue light filter. Probably native to Android 10. It gives the screen an amber tint (stated in the settings, interestingly enough)

4. Ability to stream content to TV wirelessly. I haven't tried this. Will try when I get home.

5.The SIM tray is quite unusual. It's covered on one side with a bare metal plate. It's a hybrid dual SIM + microSD card tray. I popped in a 64 GB Sandisk Extreme card with 17 folders of photos and videos. I use Simple Gallery to view them. Caching the thumbnails quite slow. Might be card issue or might be app issue. Nevertheless, photos come out nicely.

6. Screen brightness is very low actually. In office, I am at 91% brightness. If I push the slider to 50%, the screen gets way too dim. Not sure if I getting it right. But I think the super bright setting is sucking up a lot of power. No ambient light sensor though. But screen quality is good. Won't lose out to the Samsung Tab A 10.1 2019. The Tab A is a TFT screen, this is an IPS screen. I feel the iPlay20 screen is marginally better. Need to compare side by side.

7. Notification setting is a bit dumb. You have to tap each app to change the notification profile. It's not a list of apps with the switch on the side of each line. A bit strange.

8. The wallpaper setting is also a bit strange. I tried using both a portrait and landscape photo for both the lockscreen and the home screen. The tablet is portrait oriented. But when putting in a photo, the orientation defaults to landscape. Which means if you rotate the tablet to portrait orientation, you can't see most of the photo, especially mine which has people in them. Very very weird. I don't get that with the Samsung. The UI automatically displays the central portion of the photo in portrait mode and when flipped to landscape mode, will display the full photo. I don't know if this is an issue with how Android handles photos or it's just the UI not optimized. Any ideas will be welcome!

9. Since the tablet is portrait oriented, there is an app dock at the bottom of the screen. You can't get rid of the dock so when you rotate the tablet to landscape mode, the dock remains on the side... so instead of two rows of apps like in the portrait mode, you get one row horizontally and the dock displayed vertically... again very weird. No setting to change that that I know of.

10. I haven't tried the LTE function yet. Will try with TPG (data only) and Singtel (voice + data) and Starhub (data only) and report back. A dialer is included so is a contact app. So I think you can actually use this as a phone. Whatsapp and Viber are installed by default it seems.

11. This is for now... will edit and update again...

Thanks for the review. You might want to try a 3rd party launcher like Nova? I also have both the tab A 10.1 2019 and mediapad T5 and the screen and icons look a lot better on the tab A compared to the T5 as well.

You are right about the maximum brightness though. I think this tablet is only suitable for indoor usage.

Sent from Xiaomi MI 9T PRO using GAGT

 

[Teo Ming Ern]

I installed Nova... definitely looks better with the Material Design language... the wallpaper also looks better... works out better... these Chinese tablets have software that really look outdated... I don't know why... not very difficult to ape the nicer design languages of the more successful UIs...

 

[yusoffb01]

I installed Nova... definitely looks better with the Material Design language... the wallpaper also looks better... works out better... these Chinese tablets have software that really look outdated... I don't know why... not very difficult to ape the nicer design languages of the more successful UIs...

use cpl lighter on resources and free

 

[xiaofan]

A launcher is just a launcher. You soon get used to it.

I was also playing with different launchers for Galaxy S4 LTE+ back in 2016 and then rooted Android TV boxes back in 2018. In the end I always go back to the stock launcher because it is still the more smooth one compared to the 3rd party launchers with more features.

I am also using the stock EMUI launcher for my Huawei M5 8inch Youth Edition (China version of the M5 Lite with Kirin 710 CPU) -- using stock ROM without GMS as well.

 

[Teo Ming Ern]

A launcher is just a launcher. You soon get used to it.

I was also playing with different launchers for Galaxy S4 LTE+ back in 2016 and then rooted Android TV boxes back in 2018. In the end I always go back to the stock launcher because it is still the more smooth one compared to the 3rd party launchers with more features.

I am also using the stock EMUI launcher for my Huawei M5 8inch Youth Edition (China version of the M5 Lite with Kirin 710 CPU) -- using stock ROM without GMS as well.

For Samsung and Huawei, the stock launcher has everything you need even if it doesn't look as good... especially for Huawei... Samsung's One UI looks pretty good now I must say... both 1.0 & 2.1 looks good... Huawei, especially on the T5 & M5 Lite, still looks like out of the Kitkat days...

But for plain vanilla China UIs and launchers... they're really basic... I installed Nova and it's so much better... the degree of customisation is quite liberating... basically my mum uses the tablet, so the interface has to be as close to her Samsung phone as possible to avoid her getting confused about what to do... so I find Nova helpful, and not to mention nicer looking as well...

I agree about getting use to the Launcher and its quirks but I think I'm kind of baked into a certain way of using my devices... so I appreciate the ability to customize which is why I use Android anyway... hahaha...

 

[Teo Ming Ern]

use cpl lighter on resources and free

Oh... let me check it out... I am more familiar with Nova cos I have been using it to overlay Xiaomi's phones as they want an app drawer but those Redmi 5-based phones didn't have that option then...

Thank you for the suggestion!

 

[yusoffb01]

best tablet for its price

 

[Teo Ming Ern]

best tablet for its price

Nice video! Corroborates most of my experience. Except the screen.