VOYO i8 Pro 4G Tablet, 3/64 GB, 10.1-inch

A little over a month ago, I published a review of the AlldoCube Power M3 4G tablet, and today I have its near-identical copy, the VOYO i8 Pro 4G, in my hands. The tablets are indeed very similar, at least on paper, but are they really the same in practice?


Since the AlldoCube Power M3 4G and VOYO i8 Pro 4G are very similar, I'll compare them from time to time during the review. I'll start with the specifications to highlight what they have in common.

Operating system: Android 7.0
Processor: MTK MT6753 Octa-core 4G 64-bit (ARM-A53)
GPU: IMail-T720-MP3
RAM: 3 GB
Flash memory: 64 GB
microSD card slot
10.1-inch IPS display
Resolution: 1920 x 1200 (16:10)
Cameras:
Front: 2.0 MP
Rear: 5.0 MP
Navigation: GPS
Wireless: Wi-Fi: 802.11b/g/n 2.4 and 5 GHz + Bluetooth 4.0
SIM card slot — shared, for two miniSIM cards
Network types: FDD-LTE,GSM,TD-SCDMA,TDD-LTE,WCDMA
2G: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
3G: WCDMA B1 2100MHz,WCDMA B2 1900MHz,WCDMA B5 850MHz,WCDMA B8 900MHz
4G: B1 2100MHz,B3 1800MHz,B7 2600MHz,TDD B38 2600MHz,TDD B39 1900MHz,TDD B40 2300MHz,TDD B41 2500MHz
3.5mm headphone jack
microUSB port — no OTG.
Battery: 6500mAh
10-point multitouch
Dimensions and weight: length x width x thickness: 242 x 172 x 9.0 mm
Weight: 450 grams

So, the first key differences: the VOYO has 3/64 GB of RAM and storage instead of 2/32 GB on the AlldoCube, a microUSB port instead of USB Type-C, and a 6500mAh battery instead of 8000mAh. The rest is more or less the same.

The packaging is in VOYO's familiar style: white, with colorful pictures and sturdy cardboard.


But the inside is a bit of a letdown. The AlldoCube's accessories were packed in a separate box; here, everything is loose in the large box, free to move around as it pleases, which is obviously worse.


The contents are identical:
1. VOYO i8 Pro 4G tablet
2. USB-microUSB cable
3. Charger (power adapter)
4. Manual, warranty card



The manual is in English and Chinese; the box also included a brief description and a warranty card.
The cable is nothing special, just a standard cable included in the box.
The power adapter is also very ordinary: 2 A, 5 V. It doesn't get particularly warm during use, but that's not because it's especially high-quality; it's more likely because the charging current is below 2 A.


The design doesn't stand out in any particular way: the usual wide bezels, the screen, and the camera lens at the top.
A separate word about the bezels. Narrow bezels look much better aesthetically, but personally, I find wider bezels more convenient. Of course, everyone can decide what works best for them. Here, the side bezels are about 13 mm wide, and the top and bottom ones are 17 mm. I think they could all have been reduced to 10 mm for a reasonable compromise between comfort and a neat appearance.


Overall, it looks fine. By the way, there was no shipping film, just a screen protector, which is a little unusual.


Above the screen is a 2 MP camera. It probably isn't suitable for selfies, but it's fine for something like Skype.


Lately, I've gotten used to tablet controls being placed along the top (long) edge, but here they're on the narrow edge of the body.
When holding the tablet horizontally, the volume and power buttons are at the top right. Above them is the 3.5mm headset jack, and below them is the reset button hole.


The tablet has just one external port: microUSB. It's a shame there's no extra power input or HDMI output.
Again, most devices have all their ports on the short edge, but here it's the other way around :)


Yes, folks, it's pink. At least, that's the only color shown on the product page, so I think it will appeal more to women.
The back cover is aluminum, with a small decorative milled edge around the perimeter. If you don't get hung up on the color, it actually looks pretty good. The main advantage in this case is that it doesn't show dirt easily :)


There are two speakers at the bottom, and roughly in the middle, on the edge, there's a microphone hole.


The camera is barely protected at all, although the protruding diffuser for the "flash" offers it some indirect protection.


The top section, including the camera cover and diffuser, is removable. It comes off fairly easily, but putting it back on isn't very convenient. At least, I tried several times and never quite got the hang of it. It stays on very securely.


1. I mentioned how the cover comes off and goes back on for a reason. Besides the SIM card slots, there's also a memory card slot underneath it. SIM cards don't need changing very often, but memory cards are replaced much more frequently.
Speaking of SIM cards, honestly, I didn't expect to see the "good old" miniSIM format in a mobile device anymore. This can cause some problems. If you're using a new card, everything will probably be fine, but if you're using microSIM or nanoSIM cards taken from another device, you'll need an adapter.
For my tests, I used two cards: one miniSIM and one microSIM with an adapter.

2. The rear camera has a 5 MP resolution and autofocus. The LED light is rather weak, though, and it's mounted a little crooked.


Disassembly.
The tablet is fairly easy to take apart. First, remove the SIM card compartment cover, then undo a few screws. After that, use something thin to separate the two halves of the case, starting at the top, where it's easiest.


The layout is much like that of most tablets from Chinese manufacturers. Though it was immediately obvious that the battery doesn't take up all the available space inside the case.



1. The tablet has three antennas, two of them in the top section of the case.
2. The two camera modules and the light are in the center.
3. The third antenna is in the lower-right corner when viewed from the front, with the tablet held horizontally.
4. At the bottom are two speakers, a microphone, and a vibration motor.


A fairly large part of the circuit board is covered by metal shields.


The SIM card and memory card slots. Interestingly, one of the antennas is connected not by a cable like the others, but via spring contacts.


All right, let's remove the shields. They're not soldered in place, but held by special clips. There are some oddities here too: normally, a thermal pad is placed between the processor and the shield, but there isn't one here.



1. Mediatek MT6753V SoC, the same one used in the AlldoCube Power M3 4G
2. Samsung eMMC flash memory, the same as in the AlldoCube, but with a capacity of 64 GB. Next to it is an MT6625 chip, which, as far as I understand, handles Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, and FM.
3. The RAM chip is also from Samsung. Lately, I've been seeing memory from this company in Chinese devices very often.
4. MT6169V. There's some ambiguity here. Some sources identify it as a power management IC, others as an RF transceiver. There's even a detailed datasheet.
5. AP6716 GSM chip
6. This one is definitely a multichannel power management and battery charging controller: MT6326V


Auxiliary components.


Let's get back to the battery.
According to the label, it has a capacity of 6500 mAh and a voltage of 3.7 V.


Let's try to measure its actual capacity. Lately, I've been using my own test method for this. It's not very convenient, but it gives a more realistic picture.


First, I discharge the tablet until it shuts itself off.
Then I connect it to an electronic load, draw about 0.2C for roughly half a minute, and note the voltage.
The voltage shown by the meter is the device's cutoff voltage. In this case, it’s 3.47 V, which seems a bit high to me; there’s still plenty of capacity left.


Then I reconnect the battery and fully charge it using the device itself, whether that’s a tablet or a smartphone.
Once charging is complete, I connect the battery to the electronic load again.
I then set the discharge current to 0.2C (1.3 A in this case) and set the test points at these voltages:
3.47 V — the tablet’s automatic shutdown voltage
3.0 and 2.8 V — almost fully discharged and fully discharged.

I start the test and measure the capacity. In this case, the results were:
Capacity used by the tablet — 3.388 Ah
Remaining capacity — 1.223+0.057=1.28 Ah
Total battery capacity — 3.388+1.28=4.668 Ah.

As you can see, the result falls well short of the claimed capacity, which once again confirmed my suspicion that the tablet was designed for a larger (and higher-capacity) battery.


Mostly just to double-check and experiment, I started charging with the cutoff voltage set to 4.35 V. That was a mistake, but I’ll explain why below.
The battery charged for three and a half hours, after which its own protection circuit disconnected it.


This surprised me a little, but then I remembered that the battery was marked 3.7 V, not 3.8 V like modern smartphone batteries.
But my mistake wasn’t simply due to carelessness. After disconnecting the charged battery from the tablet, I saw a voltage of 4.26 V, which threw me off. Seeing a voltage noticeably higher than 4.2 V, I assumed the battery’s charge cutoff voltage was 4.35 V and set the charger to the same voltage.


Then I got a little curious. I set the charge cutoff voltage to 4.3 V, left the charging current unchanged since it was already charging in CV mode anyway, and decided to continue the test.
The battery charged properly until the charger’s automatic cutoff, and I "poured" another 300 mAh or so into it, for a total of 4.433+0.3=4.733 Ah, which is quite close to the 4.668 Ah measured during discharge.
After disconnecting, the battery voltage was 4.28 V, which is also close to the previous 4.26 V after charging in the tablet itself.

So the actual charge cutoff voltage is around 4.27–4.28 V, not the specified 4.2 V. And the battery capacity isn’t 6500 mAh as printed on it, but closer to 4600 mAh. Because the cutoff threshold is reached early, the usable capacity is a modest 3.4 Ah.
Not exactly encouraging results.


The tablet has a 10.1-inch screen with a resolution of 1920x1200, making it identical in this respect to the screen on the AlldoCube Power M3 4G.
The IPS panel is about average quality. In fact, it’s the same as the one in the AlldoCube mentioned above: it’s not bad, but there’s nothing outstanding about it either.
The viewing angles are more than adequate for comfortable use.


Viewed at an angle, the screen shows the familiar light bleed in the corners found on relatively inexpensive tablets.
There’s enough brightness headroom to see the screen clearly in fairly bright light, such as with a flash shining on it. The manual brightness adjustment range is wide, too, so no complaints there.


Now let’s move on to the software and tests.

Surprisingly, I was pleasantly impressed by the wallpaper on the home screen, as well as by the icons being arranged on the right side of the screen.
There are "virtual Android buttons" at the bottom of the screen. They appear in different modes, sometimes on a transparent background and sometimes on a black one. They disappear automatically when watching videos and using some apps, and you can bring them back by swiping up from the bottom edge of the screen.


Since the tablet is equipped with a GSM module, its selection of apps is almost identical to that of most Chinese smartphones. In fact, this tablet belongs to the phablet class, i.e. It's a sort of hybrid between a smartphone and a tablet—or you could just call it a big smartphone :)


Android 7.0 is preinstalled.
There aren't many preinstalled apps, so they take up just 272 MB, leaving 54 GB of flash storage available to the user.


The over-the-air update attempt didn't work out, though I had no complaints about the preinstalled software.


Here is the information from CPU-Z. It's almost the same as on the AlldoCube Power M3 4G; the only differences are the amount of RAM and flash storage.




As with the AlldoCube Power M3 4G, this tablet also has a 2.4/5 GHz Wi-Fi chip.
Under good conditions, connection speeds are 65/135 Mbps.


About the same number of access points are visible nearby, but data transfer speeds in the 5 GHz band are worse.
The AlldoCube delivered 8/28/52 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz band, while the tablet under review managed 18/14/30 under the same conditions.

But as soon as I switched to the 5 GHz band, everything changed dramatically: the AlldoCube delivered 21/90/104, while the tablet under review managed just 2/6/54.

The tablet's orientation and how I held it had a fairly strong effect on the results. I got higher, more stable results too, but only by turning the tablet so its screen faced the access point. I didn't have to do that with the AlldoCube.


The sensor selection is a complete failure: only the gyroscope and microphone work. The AlldoCube also had a working ambient light sensor.
It supports 10 simultaneous touch points, just like the AlldoCube, although the store page lists only 5. That's a mistake.


GPS navigation.
The tablet works with both GPS and GLONASS. Sensitivity is average; I think, once again, that's due to the aluminum body and its dependence on orientation.


But it did an excellent job of recording a track—I was even surprised.
For the test, I put the tablet in a bag with the screen facing away from me, then walked along a path in one direction and back the other way. The tablet was facing one way (north) on the outward leg, then the opposite way (south) on the return. Both tracks lined up well, with high accuracy; the deviation was literally two or three meters. Some devices show deviations of up to 5–10 meters in this test.


Of course, I also tested battery life. The thing is, measuring battery capacity is one thing, while measuring battery life is quite another, even though the former is related to the latter. Battery life depends more on software optimization and quality, though.

First, synthetic benchmarks: two Geekbench tests (at 0% and 100% brightness), plus PCMark at around 70% brightness (the most comfortable setting).
The AlldoCube had 6856 mAh of usable capacity, while the tablet under review had 3388 mAh—noticeably less (by half). But the test results aren't that different: 4.10 and 8.53 for the tablet under review, versus 5.41 and 10.25 for the AlldoCube. That's a noticeable difference.
PCMark gave a somewhat strange result, but I'll get to that separately.


There was a reason for the strange PCMark result. It should have been noticeably higher, but the cause was an "quirk" of the tablet.
During the Geekbench test, I noticed that the battery indicator was initially very accurate, then suddenly dropped to 1%. I expected the tablet to shut down, but it didn't—it kept working normally. It turned out it ran for about another hour at that 1%.
What's more, when I connected the power, the tablet almost immediately showed a 50% charge.


However, charging started normally from zero in the following tests, but the discharge graph was just as strange.
As for PCMark, it measures battery life only down to 20%, rather than running until the battery is fully discharged like Geekbench, which explains the odd result.
But that's not all: after the PCMark test ended, the charge percentage dropped right before my eyes, falling from 20% to 11% in about a minute.

Overall, it seems the tablet is calibrated for a battery of one capacity, but has a smaller one installed, which explains the oddities in the graph.


Synthetic benchmarks are all well and good, but I also test battery life while playing a movie, always the same one. Full HD resolution, 60–70% brightness (I choose the most comfortable setting).
The tablet played the movie for 7 hours and 45 minutes, while the AlldoCube managed only 6.5 hours under the same conditions.


But the discharge graph is just as wonky as before.


In my battery test, I wrote that the cutoff voltage is somewhat unusual for the installed battery: it's higher than for a 3.7 V battery and lower than for a 3.8 V one.
So I started charging and, out of curiosity, checked the voltage with CPU-Z. With the battery nearly charged, it was 4.306 V; once charging was complete, it dropped to 4.288 V. This is consistent with my assumptions in the capacity measurement section. In my view, they chose some middle-ground charging voltage, even though the installed battery is rated at 3.7 V (4.2 V), and this charging mode is harmful to it.


I also mentioned that the charger doesn't overheat during operation. The thing is, the charging current is about 1.2–1.3 A, not the 2 A the power supply is rated for.
Charging takes about 4.5 hours, which is quite a long time.


Above you can see the “charged capacity.” These are the results from before the capacity tests with an electronic load. After that test, I ran the measurement again and got a slightly higher result, but I don’t know why that happens—at least not yet.


The tablet provides access to the engineering menu using the standard code: *#*#3646633#*#*
The information there showed that, unlike the AlldoCube, this tablet supports Band 20, which is used in some Russian cities.


The camera settings are pretty standard: HDR, panorama, flash. You can also adjust video and photo quality. Nothing special, really.


Photo quality is about the same as on the AlldoCube Power M3 4G. It’s passable in daylight, but under artificial lighting it’s pretty dismal. Autofocus works, but often lags.
As I said last time, it’s only really suitable for taking pictures of things like notices. It’s definitely not for artistic photography.


To sum up.
In terms of design, performance, stability, and ease of use, it’s much the same as the AlldoCube Power M3 4G, perhaps a little worse.
Battery life is shorter on average, but the battery was rated for a lower capacity to begin with, so it more or less evens out. The software is a little better optimized, and the battery is noticeably smaller.
The 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi is about the same, but the Voyo’s 5 GHz Wi-Fi is worse. It works properly only in the room with the router or the one next door.
As for the cameras, well, you could say they’re there. That’s about it.

But the battery itself really surprised me. I’ve already reviewed two of their devices, a mini PC and a netbook. Back then, I was happy with the build quality and how they worked. At first glance, this one seems pretty good too, but I don’t know how the manufacturer ended up fitting a battery whose actual capacity is lower than stated both in the specs and on the battery itself.
Worse still, it uses a battery with a maximum charging voltage of 4.2 V, but charges it to 4.3 V, which will accelerate wear. At the same time, it discharges the battery while leaving a huge amount of capacity unused. In my view, they could easily have set the charge voltage to 4.17–4.18 V and the discharge cutoff to 3.2 V. That would have increased runtime while significantly reducing battery wear.

All in all, it’s a somewhat odd tablet: stable, with reasonably good battery life (considering the battery capacity), GPS that works well, Band 20, 4G, plenty of flash storage, 3 GB of RAM, 2.4/5 GHz Wi-Fi, and a decent screen. But it also has a very odd battery, unreliable 5 GHz Wi-Fi, and cameras that are “there for the sake of it.”

The store provided the coupon GBTPC, which brings the tablet’s price down to $160.8.

That’s all from me. I hope you found the review useful. As always, I’m looking forward to your questions and comments.