Teclast P40HD Review – 10.1-Inch Budget Tablet With 8GB + 8GB RAM, 128GB UFS Storage, Navigation Sensors, Android 13

The Teclast P40HD 2023 is among the very cheapest 10.1-inch Android 13 tablets you can buy today, but it still has 8GB of RAM and a Full HD screen, even though it's in the Fire HD 10 price range: https://www.amazon.com/TECLAST-Android-Tablets-Cellular-1920×1200

So is it any good? Well I sought to find out in my Teclast P40HD review.

First impressions are good. The build quality is good out of the box, it's sturdy, and it comes with protective shipping film on the front and back that peels off, but it also has a second layer of tempered screen protector which I kept on for most of the review.

Though the second layer of screen protector affected the touchscreen responsiveness a little, so it felt the best without any screen protector on at all.

Teclast P40HD is powered by the octa-core Unisoc T606 processor which gave me a Geekbench 6 benchmark score of 375 in single-core and 1385 in multi-core score when running Android 13. So that makes it easy to determine whether this tablet is fast enough for you. And this chipset also carries with it the Mali-G57 GPU.

But the real value lies in the 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM, which can be expanded upon with an additional 8GB of virtual RAM. So for all your RAM intensive tasks, this is a tablet to consider on a budget. How much virtual RAM you want to set aside, is something you simply adjust in the settings any time you want to adjust that up or down.

It also has 128GB of storage, which is still good in this price range. It's the quicker UFS storage type too. And the motherboard supports microSD cards up to 1TB in size, so cheap storage upgrades are easily available.

So this even works out fine for all the normal free games on Google Play. It's only when someone is serious about gaming that they'll want a faster processor.

The 10.1-inch LCD screen could have had a few more nits brightness for my taste, but that's why this is a budget tablet. And when browsing, the 1920 x 1200 Full HD display resolution lacked some of the sharpness of the best tablets in the 10-inch tablet category. But this didn't seem like an issue when gaming or watching movies though.

There are a few screen adjustment settings for this in Android, so this can be tweaked a little. But the Teclast P40HD supports Widevine L1, and ran movies fine in Full HD in Netflix and Amazon Prime.

The tablet is not meant to support digitizer pens, but I tested it with a few digitizer pens anyway, and it was able to pick up the strokes, but there was a latency of between 15 to 25ms. But still good enough for highlighting paragraphs in PDF files I would say.

The stereo speakers are located underneath the tablet in landscape mode, and can be turned somewhat loud. Other than that they sounded a little bit above average for tablet speakers in this price range. But there is a 3.5mm audio jack on top for earbuds or additional speakers.

The rear camera has a 13MP camera with LED flash, and an image resolution of 4920 x 3104 with a 32mm camera lens. It supports 1080p FHD video recording at 30fps. The front camera for video calls is a 5MP camera with a resolution up to 2592 x 1944 with a 32mm lens. And it actually has facial recognition for unlocking the tablet quickly.

The rear camera can overexpose photos a little if you are not careful, so you may have to take a few pictures with different light meter settings before you are satisfied with the quality.
Whenever that situation arise on an Android tablet, I prefer to try out other camera apps instead, which can make the photo shooting process a lot simpler. But generally it does best on close range photos.

It has built-in 4G LTE, but it all depends on the region you are going to use it in, so check out in advance whether your regional bands are supported. Most people don't buy it for that anyway. But band support is for 4G (FDD): B1, B3, B5, B7, B8, B20; 4G (TDD): B34, B38, B39, B40, B41; 3G (WCDMA): B1, B2, B5, B8; and down to 2G (GSM): B2, B3, B5, B8.

It also has Bluetooth 5.0 which works quickly when pairing it with keyboards, mouse, or Bluetooth speakers. The Wi-Fi specs are dual-band 2.4 Ghz + 5 Ghz 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi 5 with Wi-Fi Direct.

The Wi-Fi bandwidth is fine when used within a range of 1-2 rooms away, but any further than that and it starts to struggle. But this is chipset thing, since this is decided mainly by the Wi-Fi modem on the Unisoc T606 chipset.

That said, it has a lot of tablet sensors for a tablet in this price range, including accelerometer, step detector, step counter, ambient light sensor, GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo navigation sensors.

The navigation sensors were able to find 9 satellites within one minute when tested outdoors on an almost clear day, so that's also good in this price range.

Battery life when setting the screen to 80% brightness and running videos, has been around 8 hours. Charging to 100% from 1% takes a little less than 3 hours, as it comes with a 10W USB-C charger. The battery capacity is listed as 6000 mAh (average) by Teclast, but my battery meter actually came back with a measurement of 6252 mAh, so no complaints there.

In terms of design, Teclast P40HD has the power button and the volume rockers on the left side in landscape mode, which works out okay. The SIM tray and microSD card slot, as well as the audio combo jack are located on top. So the design has a logical layout.

The thickness is 8.4mm while the weight is 514 grams. And I dare say that the touch and feel of the tablet is actually on the premium side. It's pleasant to hold around the bezels and edges, with no sharp edges. And the texturized but smooth grey back has just the right feel to it so that it doesn't slip out the grip.

In conclusion, you can see that there are pros and cons to the Teclast P40HD. It's not flagship perfect, but it is very cheap and has a surprisingly good level of specs.

– Tom Bowen