Roamin' Roman
For what it costs, yeah... 5 stars
Ecopad C5 ProIt is what it is – a cheap 11” Android 16 tablet. In the case of the particular tablet I received, I don’t think cheap necessarily means bad.My user experience has been almost all good. Keep in mind that – for me, a tablet has only two uses. 1) I use tablets primarily to read books. 2) I occasionally (rarely) use one to stream video when I’m cooking, or outside doing something I need step by step instructions for. That’s pretty much it. My tablets rarely go online, other than to do updates immediately prior to using one of the streaming apps, and while I’m streaming.I don’t game on a tablet. I very rarely browse the internet. I have perfectly good computers, and a nice cell phone for doing those things.What is this tablet, really? The one I received is an Ecopad C5 Pro. Several companies get these, and re-brand them as their own. It’s common practice, and should come as no surprise to anyone. There are several of them available right here on Amazon.The specs on the tablet I received *DO NOT* match the specs in the ad. I think maybe the one I got is the 2nd generation of this tablet that I found while doing some research on the Ecopad C5 Pro. I may be wrong, and this may be an even newer generation of the tablet. I don’t know. So many companies sell it with different specs that it’s confusing. In settings, check “About Tablet” to find the specs on yours.The ad says 4GB of physical RAM. The one I was sent has 6GB of physical RAM. 28GB is available with “extended RAM” or “RAM Boost” or whatever you want to call it. Using extended RAM wears on the SSD and can actually slow a device down. I don’t need more than 6GB, so I turned it off.The SSD is a 128GB model of unknown manufacture. If you leave the “extended ram” on, less is going to be usable because part of it is being used as SWAP space.The ad says it comes with a UNISOC T606 CPU. Mine came with a UNISOC T7280, which is a little faster. The T7280 has 2 ARM Cortex A75 2.2ghz cores, 6 ARM Cortex A55 1.8ghz cores, and a Mali G57 MP1 GPU on the chip. It’s fast enough for what I use a tablet for. Whether yours comes with the T606, or T7280, neither is a high performance CPU. Both are made for lower end 4G cell phones, and tablets.The battery lasts a long time. I disabled a few apps, and turned down the brightness to 30%, and can tell you it’s now using around 6% per hour reading books. The lower the charge gets, the quicker it seems to go down, but not drastically quicker.I haven’t used it for streaming video yet, so I don’t know how fast it drains the battery using Prime Video, or Spectrum TV, or Kodi. Maybe I’ll need to stream something soon, and update the review.It’s advertised as “fast charging,” and what I found through other sources says the Ecopad C5 Pro charges at 18w. As an experiment, I connected it to my 65w phone charger, and a 45w charger. It seems to charge faster using either of those than using a 20w charger. So maybe it will charge faster than advertised? Maybe. Definitely, when connected to the 45w charger, it says, “charging rapidly.” It doesn’t say that when it’s connected to the 20w charger.The screen seems to be either an OLED, or one of the best LCDs I’ve ever seen. I say this because the blacks are actually black, and not an extremely dark gray. Resolution is set at 1280x800. This seems very low for 2026, but it’s bright, and the colors are sharp and clear. I watched a local 720p, x264 video file on it and it was beautiful. I was pleasantly surprised.The cameras aren’t great. I won’t even say they’re good, because I’d be lying to you. I can’t get it to do the face unlock at all, because no matter how many times I try, it won’t read my face into the settings. I don’t mind it, but I’m guessing it’s the 5MP front camera that causes this. You may have better luck. I can only tell you my experience. This may be my fault because I disabled Gemini. Then again, I disabled it on my phone, and face unlock works just fine. I’m blaming the front camera.It’s advertised as a Widevine L1 compatible tablet. I can neither confirm, nor deny this because I honestly don’t know. It’ll stream 720p video. I don’t know if it will stream HD in Prime Video, or Netflix, or any other service that requires Widevine L1 to stream in HD, so… Maybe someone else has said, or can say for sure.It has a headphone jack! Okay, I admit I’ll probably never use it, but it’s there if I ever want to.I don’t know if it has an FM receiver. I will, in the future, add an app that controls the radio if it’s there.What apps have I added? MPV media player for local videos, Musicolet to listen to the mp3s I have on a mSD card, Waze to go along with Google Maps (which was preinstalled), Moon Reader for ebooks, Waterfox browser for privacy, Prime Video, Spectrum TV, and Kodi.I disabled the YouTube apps, along with all the Google apps I won’t be using (Gemini, Books, Music, One, TV, etc). Disabling them hasn’t made the tablet unstable. YMMV on that, but on this particular tablet, it’s working good with all of that disabled.*NOTE – I AM NOT ADVISING YOU TO DISABLE ANYTHING, ONLY THAT I DON’T NEED THEM, AND DISABLING THEM HASN’T MADE MY PARTICULAR TABLET UNSTABLE IN ANY WAY – DISABLE APPS AT YOUR OWN RISK!*Also, do yourself a favor and uninstall “Tapscreen” because it’s annoying. Or don’t. Up to you. Uninstalling it seems to have eliminated the full screen popups that appeared when I first got it. I don’t know how long that’ll last, but for the moment…If there is an unboxing video of this tablet, I imagine it’s very short, and boring. The only thing in the box is the tablet (already in the case, already with the glass screen protector attached), a USB-A to C cable, and a user guide I never opened, or read.There is a paper pasted to the bottom of the box identifying the tabled as a “C5” and showing the company of manufacture, and where it’s located in China. It doesn’t show that it’s the “Pro” variant, or the T7280 model, or any sort of specs.So far, I’m happy with it. I came into this with pretty low expectations. Those expectations have been exceeded. I think that’s why I’m as happy with it as I am.What am I most disappointed with? File transfer speeds from my laptop to this tablet. Using the data cable that came with it, it topped out around 4Mbs. Sorry folks, but that’s pitiful. I don’t know whether to blame it on the tablet, or the USB cable, but I have nothing else I need to move to it to find out.I’ve read a good many of the bad reviews about this tablet, along with quite a few of the good ones. It seems to be a hit or miss kind of deal. You get a good one, or you don’t.What do I most dislike about it? Probably that tapping the screen doesn’t wake the tablet from sleep. I’ve had this on every Android device I’ve owned for at least 10 years, but it does nothing on this tablet. Or maybe I’m too ignorant to figure out how to enable it. Either way, I don’t like having to use the power button to wake it every time.Is this the best tablet available? Absolutely not.Is this the best tablet available for less than $100 new? I don’t know. Maybe?I think how good it is or isn’t depends on what you want a tablet for. I read, and stream videos, and sometimes listen to some music while I read. I’m happy with it.If I were a serious gamer, I’d have had to spend 3x – probably more like 6x or 7x to get something I’d be happy with. It’s all about CPU power, and graphics performance. This lacks in both.There are probably more things I can’t think of right now. I hadn’t intended this review to be this long.Anyhow… These are my thoughts after using it for about three weeks. If things change in the near future, I’ll update this.*EDIT – The slow file transfer was caused by the USB cable that came with the tablet. You’re going to want to find a “good” cable to use with it if you plan on moving files from your PC to the tablet. Using a high quality cable, I got over 15MBs moving a video file to it today. Not great, but not bad.There is a radio receiver. To use it, you need a wired set of earbuds or earphones to act as an antenna. I don’t know how well it works. I’ll probably never use it unless I’m trying to listen to the announcer at one of the local race tracks that broadcasts on a low power FM frequency.Streaming video is very good. It streamed in at 720p. I don’t know if the Spectrum TV app requires Widevine L1 or not, so I still can’t say it does or doesn’t have it.It uses power at roughly double the rate of reading a book. At least with the Spectrum TV app, this is true. An hour of streaming while I was cooking the other day used 15% of the battery. I don’t think that’s bad, because I’d have to do several hours of streaming to run the battery down.I’m still happy with it after a couple months usage. It does everything I’ve asked of it well. So far, it’s exceeded my expectations of a tablet I paid less than $100 for.**Final Edit(?)Using Kodi to stream, video uses even less battery. It used about 12% per hour. Using either Kodi, or Spectrum TV, it’s capable of streaming for hours before you need to plug it in. Excellent as far as I’m concerned. I still haven’t streamed using the Prime Video app, so I don’t know how much it may use. I can’t imagine it would be much different than the other two apps.After 3 months use, we ordered another one (from a different seller, to make sure we got the same specs). The 2nd is for my mom. She’d used the same 10” tablet for at least 6 years. She needed, and deserved a newer, faster, better tablet.I set it up very similarly – disabling all the things she’ll never need for a tablet she’ll probably only ever read books on with the Kindle app, and play “brain games” on to help her stay sharp.I think talking my mom into getting one of these is about the highest praise I could possibly give these tablets. She’s enjoying how fast it is, and how long the battery lasts.I’m enjoying the fact I won’t have to deal with finding things in settings on a 6+ year old tablet with Fire OS. Android 16 is *nice.*That’s it from me unless something goes badly wrong with one of the tablets.Ver másVer menos
16 personas la encontraron útil
