Teclast T70 Tablet business tablet review

Teclast T70 Tablet: 30-second review

Teclast has produced useful equipment, such as the modestly powered F16 Pro laptop. The T70 is one of its top-tier tablets, designed for both home and office use.

Where many tablets are limited to 10 or 11-inch displays, the T70 offers a large 14-inch IPS panel that might be ideal for working with a stylus if Teclast provided one.

That hints at the biggest issue with this design: Teclast didn’t create any accessories for it. A large tablet needs a cover with a stand and a stylus, but these appear missing from this offering.

All the other tablet designs that Teclast makes have the option of a folio case, so we can only hope that the T70 is at least blessed with one at some point.

Inside the stylish and thin metallic teal chassis, the electronics that drive the T70 are similar to those of rugged phones that use the MediaTek Helio G99 SoC. This chip supports 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, providing plenty of room for an extensive suite of applications and data.

The SoC also supports dual-band WiFi and 4G LTE mobile comms, and the SIM tray also accepts a MicroSD card, allowing the internal storage to be significantly expanded.

It’s not quite up there with the best business tablets. The T70’s weaknesses include a glossy screen that makes it challenging to use outdoors, and the scale of the screen backlight dramatically impacts battery life. Also, the cameras aren’t at the level I’d expect in an entry-level phone.

But, if you need a big Android tablet for presentations or scribbling ideas on, the Teclast T70 isn’t expensive, and with phone connectivity, it could be a helpful travel companion.

Teclast T70 Tablet: Price and availability

• How much does it cost? $350/£245/€321
• When is it out? Available now
• Where can you get it? You can get it in most regions directly from AliExpress

Oddly, Teclast offers three possible sources for the T70: Amazon, AliExpress and TEMU.

Except in the UK, Amazon.co.uk doesn’t carry this tablet, and TEMU says it’s discontinued.

On AliExpress, the cost is £189.97, although that price doesn’t include a predicated import tax of £38, bringing the total cost to £227.97 for those in the UK.

For American customers, the T70 costs $218.03, exclusive of Tax, through AliExpress.

While it isn’t currently available on Amazon.com, I did find a third-party case from NOUKAJU for it there.

Given the specifications, the price seems excellent. However, the single point of source isn’t ideal for getting the best price. Hopefully, Teclast will make it more widely available soon.

Teclast T70 Tablet: specs

Teclast T70 Tablet: design

• Solid and heavy
• Lacks fingerprint reader
• Simple feature set

Made from a block of milled aluminium that has since been teal-green anodised, the T70 is a striking device out of the box.

Though it weighs nearly a kilogram, the quality of construction has some downsides for anyone who will be carrying this Android 14 tablet all day.

While obviously sturdy, Teclast does not make any rugged claims about this device, so it isn’t recommended for use in the rain or on the beach. The best rugged tablet this, clearly, is not. But it’s not trying to be. The layout is basic at best and mimics some of the earlier Android tablets, like those made by Asus for Google. The top edge has a power button and volume rocker. On the right is the USB-C charging port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a SIM card slot. With the exception of some perforations for speaker sound, that’s all the details on the edges.

There are no pogo pins for a charging station, no custom buttons, and no fingerprint reader. Security is limited to either a PIN code or face recognition using the front-facing camera.

On the rear, a camera cluster on the upper right is well placed to avoid fingers but does stick out enough to prevent the tablet from lying entirely flat.

Along with being nicely made, the single stand-out feature of this design is the 14-inch IPS panel the T70 uses. Viewing angles could be better, but the colours are punchy, and the image seems remarkably crisp in terms of resolution.

Teclast quotes 1080p as the resolution, but curiously, diving into the machine specifications on the hardware reveals that it is 1920 x 1200.

However, the highly glossy glass coating on the screen is a nightmare with any strong reflected light sources.

My immediate first reaction to the T70 was that it might be highly popular with those flying drones, but without an anti-reflection coating or a hood, this tablet wouldn’t be much use outside.

Overall, the T70 is large and a bit heavy but easy to operate and a simple transition from a phone. Sometimes less is more, I concluded after my first use.

Teclast T70 Tablet: hardware

• Decent Helio G99
• Mediocre battery life

Looking through the phones and tablets I’ve reviewed in the past couple of years, six tablets and thirteen phones have used the MediaTek Helio G99 SoC at their hearts.

Depending on your perspective, its popularity is either because MediaTek sells the G99 at a low price or because it’s a solid platform. I’m more inclined to the latter proposition on that spectrum, but given the SoC some brands choose, the price might be a significant factor.

While it’s been overtaken in some respects by newer Dimensity models, the G99 delivers a generally good experience. It is fabricated at 6nm for power efficiency and supports 4G LTE communications. It doesn’t offer 5G, but in some regions, that limitation is not a real issue.

In this design, the G99 comes with 8GB of RAM and Teclast-implemented storage-to-memory mapping technology, which allows the system to see another 10GB as RAM.

Not sure if that’s a real advantage or merely a perceived one, but the Android 14 distribution used in this tablet allows for it.

Where this machine compares less favourably to other G99 tablets, like the AGM Smart Pad P2 Active, Ulefone Pad 2 and Blackview Active 8 Pro, is the amount of battery capacity included.

On a typical phone, 10000 mAh of battery would be substantial, but in a tablet that’s on the modest end of this spectrum, with designs like the Oukitel R7 Titan 5G having three times this amount.

It has more than the AGM Smart Pad P2 Active and Ulefone Armor Pad Pro, but neither is notorious for having long battery lives.

The quoted charging delivery is 33W wired, and for this battery size, that rate is fine, other than the ‘fast charger’ included with the T70, which was capped at 20W. Provided with a PSU that can output 33W, the T70 can be fully charged in around 2.5 hours.

It’s mildly disappointing that it didn’t offer wireless charging or have a charging base accessory, but Teclast hasn’t supported the T70 with the peripherals that some of its other tablets have been blessed with.

The platform on the T70 is more than adequate for general use, but as we get into some of the performance tests, a few things should have been addressed undermine it a little.

Teclast T70 Tablet: cameras

• 13MP and 0.08MP sensors on the rear
• 8MP on the front
• three cameras in total

Many of the images in my reviews are taken with a 12MP DSLR, demonstrating that megapixels aren’t everything, even if some mobile devices use 200MP sensors these days.

However, in this instance, the 13MP sensor in the T70 is quite poor, and whatever AI magic dust Teclast sprinkled on it via its associated 0.08MP secondary sensor did almost nothing for the image quality.

What blew my mind a little was that the camera app has a toggle for HDR mode. In this context, other than making the pictures longer to process, it appears to have almost no impact on the end result. In my example collection, I used HDR on all but one of the images, and it’s practically impossible to determine which one simply by looking at them.

There are some special camera modes, but there is no mechanism for detecting which one should be used. All pictures are taken at a 4:3 ratio, and there are no Pro options for manually controlling aperture or speed. It doesn’t support panoramics, bokeh, or any of the face recognition tricks that are seemingly on every phone these days.

The secondary sensor is described as an AI camera sensor, but it’s only 320 x 240, a resolution I’d associate with a thermal image capability. It might be image intensification for night shots, but that’s a horrible resolution, whatever AI model you run behind it.

From my research, this might be a sensor made by Chinese car maker BYD for vehicles, but that doesn’t explain its use on a tablet. I can confidently say that it doesn’t make the pictures good.

The cameras on the T70 have two redeeming features. One is that the primary sensor can capture 1440p resolution video, even if it doesn’t have a screen capable of playing it back at full quality.

Another positive is that this is one of the few Chinese-made tablets with Widevine L1 encryption, which allows streamed services like Netflix, Disney, and Amazon to output 1080p video to the screen.

I’m not sure if these aspects counter the low-quality pictures that this machine captures.

Teclast T70 Tablet: performance

There are so many G99-powered tablets, and it was something of an arbitrary choice for which I’d present it in comparison, but I went with a solid performer, the Ulefone Pad 2.

As you can see from the benchmark results, the Ulefone is better in some tests, and in others, the T70 has the upper hand. They use the same SoC, GPU and memory configuration, so how close these are shouldn’t surprise them.

Things get interesting when the tests come to battery life, where the T70 is something of a liability.

It’s a guess, but the size of the screen and its associated backlight appear to have a detrimental effect on battery life. While the T70 only has 54% of the battery capacity of the Ulefone tablet, it lasts barely 35% of the running time. That’s not an entire working day, and to achieve that objective, you must put the brightness settings down to a minimum.

It’s obvious that a bigger battery was needed for a screen this large, but Teclast didn’t want to make the T70 less thin or heavy. Choices were made, and running time was the loser.

Teclast T70 Tablet: verdict

The Teclast T70 is generally a pleasant tablet to use for looking at photos (taken by something else) or surfing. It’s also a nice size for streaming a TV show or movie if you can find a means to prop it up.

The features that undermine it as a business tool are the disappointing battery life, the lack of biometric security and the generally poor camera sensors.

The lack of accessories is also an annoyance, as this machine needs, at minimum, a cover and a stylus.

It is a mystery why it doesn’t support a charging station, and another is why it can charge at 33W, but the provided fast charger is only rated at 20W.

Perhaps I’m expecting too much from the T70 at this price point, but given how competitive the tablet market has become, my position only reflects the questions the buying public is likely to ask.

Should I buy a Teclast T70 Tablet?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy if…

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