Hello, this is TheTechBoy with a review of the Plimpton Tab P50.
The Plimpton Tab P50 looks to be an affordable tablet with great low-range specs. It has 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage. It sports a 10.1-inch display and the tablet supports a microSD card and it has USB-C. It has keyboard support and a tablet the price is under 200 dollars. Plimpton appears to be a new company, and they kindly sent me the Tab P50 to test and review. I usually use the devices I review full time, but because I do not typically use a tablet in my workflow this will be an interesting review.
You may buy the tablet from Plimpton’s Amazon store and its website is https://plimptonline.com/. Be aware that the tablet is not 5G no matter what the listing on Amazon says.
What We Like 😀 |
What We Do Not Like😞 |
USB-C charging |
Bad Camera |
Android 11 |
Lack of Software Support |
MicroSD card slot |
Subpar Screen |
Headphone Jack |
Sluggish Performance |
Radio |
Battery Life |
Tablets fall into major categories. There are content consumption tablets that are primarily used for reading recipes and watching videos. An eReader would also fall into this category. There are also the content creation tablets, these tablets allow you to draw with a stylus and type with a keyboard. They usually fit into "laptop replacement" or drawing tablet or a combination of both. This tablet is billed as a content creation tablet (if you buy the 35 dollar keyboard) but it does not include stylus support.
Unboxing/Design:
The Tab P50 comes with a SIM card ejector and a charger pre-included in the box. This is a welcome touch and recent smartphones have stopped coming with chargers in the box. The tablet has a headphone jack on the top, and the USB-C port power and volume keys on the right side of the tablet. The tablet has a raised screen look, with the metal being a couple of centimeters behind the screen. This basically means that the screen is not flush with the metal. On the bottom, there are two speakers, and a port to connect to the (not-included) keyboard.
The device attempts to look and feel premium, and it does that pretty well until you look at the edges of the device. As noted before, the screen is raised higher than the bezels; the screen is not flush with the metal, and the MicroSD card slot has a filled-in SIM port even though this is a WiFi-only device. The device does flex and makes weird noises when bent, but the device appears to be fine.
Camera:
The tablet's camera is not very good. It has a 13 MP back camera and a 5 MP front camera. Images appear washed out and grainy. The camera does not have a night mode, but it does have an automatic flash.
The camera application only zooms in four times, and it does support slow-motion videos. The front camera is passable, but not very good.
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| The image is brighter in reality. |
Touch:
The tablet only has three physical buttons, and the main way of interacting with the tablet is via touch. The first time I unboxed it, the tablet's touch screen was missing some touch, however, the second time I booted it up the touch appeared to be fixed. However in Chrome touch always seems to be kind of slow when opening a new tab. The Google Discover feed also does not allow for the Google search bar to be used. This could be a touch issue or a speed issue. This issue somehow resolved itself and made the feed more enjoyable to read on a tablet.
Speed:
The tablet received a Work 3.0 score of (7787). This score is comparable to the OnePlus 5 and 5T (phones) which were released years ago. The system reserves about 2.3 GB of RAM for the tablet to use, and this tablet (on the first boot up) was horrible at multi-tasking. It got better on the second try, by ten Chrome tabs take up about 1 GB of RAM.
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| Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay |
Gaming:
Gaming was surprisingly decent, Madden Mobile's graphics were good, but Roblox games took some time to load, and the car in Roblox took a long time to fully load. Asphalt 8 also had okay graphics, but they were worse than the iPhone 7s. This tablet is decent with gaming, but if you attempt to open another application while the game is in the background, the application will stutter when you open it.
Display:
The Display has a Lux rating of about 94 when scanned with a smartphone camera from a couple of centimeters away. This means the display is probably around 100 nits of brightness. The display is certainly not as bright as the Samsung Galaxy Book Flex Alpha, or the Samsung A71 5G. The display of the tab P50 is decent, but not the best. The blacks are actually gray, and the screen is not as bright is it could be. This brightness of the display matters if you are outside because it means that you may not be able to see the screen in bright sunlight. The display is not good in bright sunlight, and this tablet should only be used in the shade or indoors. The display offers a settings editor in the settings menu.
Sound:
The device has two bottom-firing speakers. However, due to the tablet’s size, the speakers do not get covered up easily when you hold the tablet. The speakers could get covered up by the keyboard case if you bought one. The sound can get really loud, and I could clearly hear sound from the back of the room. The treble and bass in the speakers sound a little higher than they should. When listening to internet radio, the song sounded weird with some type of bell clinking in the background being amplified to annoying levels. The speakers are not the best, and audiophiles should steer clear of this tablet.
GPS/Connectivity:
The GPS on this device is really bad, the GPS cannot get a fix indoors where the Cosmo Communicator did, and it gets a “low accuracy” score on Google Maps. Two GPS testing applications could not get a fix on this device's location, although, Google Maps does show my accurate location. The WiFi connection is a good stationery connection, meaning if you do not move the tablet you should have a stable connection. However sometimes the connection will drop and you will have to reconnect, however, this could be fixed by auto-reconnect. This was just something we noticed during testing.
Software:
Plimpton appears to have done a great job with the software, but unfortunately, it's only in appearances. The tablet runs mostly stock Android 11 and received the June 2021 security update. However, the tablet's software appears to run haphazardly with several mentions of ‘phone’ through the UI, although it is a tablet. The tablet also has an emergency dialer on the front screen even though this is a WiFi-only model.
One application even asked me if it could make and manage phone calls!! The software also will not get Android 12, and for some reason does not alert me of my email notifications!
Security:
The device will not receive the Android 12 update meaning that the device will be outdated in the next year or so. The device also comes from an obscure manufacturer that has to prove its dedication to security by providing security updates. This has not happened as the Device is still stuck on the June 5th update from 2021. The device features the regular PIN, Password, and Pattern, and it does support 2d based face unlock. Other people or a picture could not fool it, but because it is 2d based, I would not personally trust it.
Battery:
The battery of the tablet is a 6000 mAh battery. The battery is very small for a 10.1-inch tablet with some smartphones getting to 5000 mAh batteries. Also, tablets such as the Tab S7 FE (more expensive) have 10,000 mAh batteries and have a much longer runtime.
In our battery run-down test, the device played our advertisement for five hours and 22 minutes. Because the screen is not very bright, I had to make the screen play at full brightness which also degraded the battery. This means that the battery life would be slightly lower than 5 hours 22 minutes, because the sound was off when the test was done. This is way worse than other tablets on the market like the Tab S7 FE per PC mag. The standby time is decent, and I do appreciate the USB-C charging because this is a budget tablet, and sometimes budget devices do not use the standardized port.
Conclusion:
Who is this tablet for? Plimpton seems to think it is for watching movies and videos. Plimpton also says you can use the tablet as a laptop (with the keyboard case) however the somewhat slow performance limits this tablet to web-based applications. Also having plenty of tabs open while streaming audio may cause some stuttering. The tablet's screen prevents the tablet from being a good outdoor tablet, and it is not the best screen on the market. This tablet is not good for creating content, because of the camera and speed issues, meaning it has to be good at consuming content.
The tablet is an acceptable e-reader and website browser, but because of the screen, television shows and video games may not look as good. This tablet looks like it is a good tablet for reading text-based articles and checking the news. The Tab P50 looks to be a bridge between the Kindle Fire, and Samsung’s A/Lite/FE range tablets. Even though the tablet is only 140 dollars and 175 dollars with the keyboard, I encourage you to look elsewhere for a decent tablet.
Nevertheless, if you can disregard the software and security implications of this device, and must have a tablet with access to the Play Store. And you want a tablet that has the potential to do 'real' work (with the keyboard) this may be the tablet for you. (Rating coming out soon)
The Lenovo Duet Refurbished (2020) is on sale on Amazon for 184 dollars and it includes a keyboard, a Kindle is a better-dedicated e-reader, and eBay usually has good deals on used tablets. Chromebooks have better update support, and Samsung’s tablets usually offer at least two years of software support and offer better cameras.
UPDATE: We realize that the A71 5G Screen was in a different setting than the Tab P50, but the A71's Screen is just better (non-tested).
Buy the tablet here.
You may also buy the tablet reviewed by TheTechBoy in the box from us.
Please make the comments constructive, and vulgarity will not be tolerated!