The good:
Sharp, colorful, and bright display.
Impressive sound quality.
Nice design and build.
MicroSD card support.
18W fast charge.
The bad:
Older, less powerful SoC. than competitions in the same price range.
Poor cameras.
UI not optimized for the 10.5-inch screen.
Verdict:
If you want an inexpensive tablet for media consumption and don’t mind a less well-known brand, the Alldocube X is the slate to go for.
Yes, Android tablet is still a thing in 2019, with major brands such as Samsung, Huawei and ASUS still releasing new slates, and several smaller Chinese brands such as Alldocube, Teclast and Onda still putting on sale more affordable alternatives. Although lagging behind in both popularity and functionality compared to the Apple iPads, some Android tablets do offer better design, better display and sound or generally higher performance-price ratio. The market for these devices is indeed shrinking, but still existent.
The Alldocube X is a metal-bodied slate which offers Android users a premium-looking design, a fantastic 10.5-inch AMOLED display and great sound quality. But does it match the best of the best in the game, let’s find out.
Design
Only available in one color at the moment, the Alldocube X looks neat and elegant. The metallic rear and curved sides give the slate an air of luxury.
The front is dominated by a 10.5-inch Super AMOLED display. Bezels on the left and right are relatively small, but bezels on the above and under are quite big. It won’t win any beauty contest against the more premium new iPad Pro and Samsung Galaxy Tab S4, but is at least on the same level of the Huawei MediaPad M5 Pro. A front-facing camera and a light sensor can be found above the display, the rest of the front looks clean, without any button or branding.
There is a fingerprint reader on the right side of the tablet, which is not the fastest we’ve experienced, but still admirably fast. It certainly doesn’t feel as instant as my Xiaomi Mi 8 or Vivo X20, but it does beat the in-display fingerprint reader on my Huawei Mate 20 Pro.
A USB-C port of USB 3.0 standard is also on the right side. Thankfully, you can still find a 3.5mm audio jack on the slate. Many may argue that almost everyone should own a pair of wireless headphones nowadays, but we do appreciate the option that we can still use our brilliant wired headphones with it to enjoy better sound.
A Micro SD card slot is located on the top side, but to insert a Micro SD card in the tablet you need to use an ejection tool, which is not included in the package that I received, but should be included in the retail package. I used the SIM tool from my Xiaomi Mi8 box and it worked fine.
A power/standby key and a volume rocker sit on the left side of the tablet. Both buttons have decent travel and give the users a tactile feedback.
Speaker grilles are located on the top side of the slate, an unconventional placement for this kind of devices.
The X measures 243.68mm * 173.14mm * 6.9mm, and weighs 495g. It does no fit in our hands as well as those 8-inchers, such as the Xiaomi Mi Pad 4 or the Huawei MediaPad M5 8.4, but it shouldn’t burden our hands too much, thanks to the slim and lightweight build. Despite being so thin, the X feels extraordinarily robust, mainly because of its glass front and aluminum back. The build quality is as good as these top-tier products in the market.