Tested: ZPAD 10 | No praise for slowness

For its low price, the ZPAD 10 tablet is generous in components, does quite well for daily tasks and takes honest photos. But it is sometimes so slow that it will make you lose patience.

Karim Benessaieh
The Press

WE love

The main argument of the ZPAD 10, from the Chinese manufacturer ZTE, is its price of $264. It is only available from Telus in Canada.

At this price, we have an Android tablet with a 10.36-inch screen, labeled “full HD” at 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels. Rare in this price range, the ZPAD 10 can connect to the LTE cellular network. It has 32 GB of internal storage expandable with a microSD card and 3 GB of RAM. Its processor is a 2 GHz Qualcomm SM6115, released in early 2021.

Its battery is impressive, at 7250 mAh, enough to last almost two days with normal use. Both speakers have tone and deliver surprisingly good bass.

For the photo, we have the minimum paraphernalia: 5 MP at the front and 8 MP at the rear. We don’t usually ask a tablet to be a photo pro, and the ZPAD 10 clearly isn’t. The front camera gave us respectable, albeit a little yellowed, selfies, and video conferences had a little graininess evident.

The rear camera also did an honest job with accurate colors in good lighting. Indoors, up close and in low light, the result was rather poor.

The first grip was promising. Navigating through Chrome, opening emails and glancing at a video on YouTube, managing Spotify is pretty smooth. There is of course a delay when opening applications, and the tablet certainly does not have the response of an iPad 9, but the performance seemed altogether acceptable for a tablet of this price. Other tests, however, made us disillusioned.

The software layer added by ZTE to Android 11 is discreet, not tons of homemade apps added, but some welcome tools, including a counter, which tells you how many photos your storage space can still take, and wallpapers stylized.

We love less

It only took a few tries with apps that weren’t that demanding to see the limits of the ZPAD 10. Some games like Scrabble GO that take forever to open. The too slow and bumpy experience on The Press+yet optimized for six-year-old tablets.

Our classic Geekbench 5 benchmark test confirmed that it wasn’t bad luck.

Basically, the ZPAD 10 has a lower processor performance than a $200 FireHD 10 and doesn’t even match an iPad 6 from 2018. Its graphics processing capability stats are so poor that we ran the test multiple times. for more certainty.

The availability of the ZPAD 10 is minimal in North America: Amazon offers it in theory, but stocks have not been renewed, and only Telus offers it online.

One buys ?

At first glance, with more than honest technical specifications and a good initial impression, the ZPAD 10 could have been recommended for basic use. We had a favorable bias for ZTE, which has made an affordable phone, the Axon 30, which is quite amazing.

But now, the ZPAD 10 does not offer the same miracle and its slowness will make you rage after an hour. Its purchase is not to be recommended.