[Device Reviews and Information] Jupit3r:
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.