Alldocube iPlay 80 Mini Ultra Review: The $380 iPad Mini Killer?

Remember phablets? A mix of phone and tablet. Alldocube is trying to resurrect the giant smartphone era with the iPlay 80 Mini Ultra. It’s a brand new 8,8’’ 5G gaming tablet that doubles as a smartphone. And best of all, the price starts at just $380. 

All that sounds great on paper. But can you actually trust that Alldocube didn’t cut major corners to hit a lower price? That’s what we investigated over the past 3 weeks. I used this tablet for reading, gaming, and even used it with my SIM card as a phone. And honestly, I don’t want to give it back. Let’s talk about why. 

Performance and Specs

Performance comes via the Mediatek Dimensity 8300 chip. It’s a midrange, 4nm mobile chip from 2025. The performance is surprisingly good for everyday tasks like browsing, streaming or multitasking. The tablet rarely ever feels slow.

The iPlay Mini Ultra comes with a fixed 12GB of RAM and 256GB of speedy UFS 3.1 storage. As we said, storage is expandable via Micro-SD too. For connectivity, you have Wifi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 support. While it’s not the newest standard, it’s been very reliable so far during testing.

We can compare the Alldocube’s performance against other 8-inch tablets using benchmark tests. In Geekbench 6’s CPU test, the iPlay 80 Mini Ultra is double the speed of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A11 in CPU single-core, and 135% faster in CPU multi-core. That explains why browsing feels so much smoother on it. However, the iPad Mini is 105% faster in CPU single-core and 67% faster in multi-core. 

3DMark’s Wildlife Extreme test gives us a better view of GPU and gaming performance. Here, the iPlay Mini is a solid 780% ahead of the Galaxy Tab A11. It’s also just 20% slower than the iPad Mini. Only the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 3 is able to get a significant 30% lead over the Alldocube. However, that tablet doesn’t support 5g and costs significantly more.

Gaming Performance

The actual performance for games is just as good as the benchmarks suggest. In Fortnite, the iPlay Mini Ultra is able to get a smooth 115 FPS average at the low preset. If you turn all the settings up, the game still runs at a stable 60FPS. 

The performance isn’t as impressive in Delta Force. Here, the game is capped at 60FPS at the standard graphics settings. Better graphics require you to drop the FPS to 30, which doesn’t feel very good. Of course, a 120 FPS mode would be great to have. 

In Minecraft, performance is acceptable. The game runs at a locked, smooth 120FPS on “fancy” graphics. And if you enable the new “vibrant visuals” and keep it on the performance preset, the game is still playable with 30 FPS. It might sound bad, but even the fastest tablet we’ve tested, the OnePlus Pad 4, struggles to reach 60 FPS with vibrant visuals. So the Alldocube performs great in this title.   

Battery Life

The Mini Ultra comes packed with a 7200mAh battery with up to 33W wired charging. It’s a pretty large battery on paper.

However, the tablet lasts just 6 hours while looping an HD YouTube video on max brightness. That’s not very long, and it’s actually a worse score than the iPlay 70 Mini Ultra from Alldocube with nearly identical specs, which got 8 hours and 48 minutes in the same test. But the battery life in real use isn’t as bad as the benchmark suggests. Reading for an hour at high brightness loses just about 10% battery. 

Design and Build

The iPlay 80 Mini Ultra has a sleek, modern design. The build uses completely flat plastic sides which. It’s not a unibody design. However, nothing feels cheap, and the plastic keeps the tablet light at just 330g. It’s 7,75mm thick, which isn’t an issue, but there are much thinner tablets out there. 

The back of the tablet has a dual-ring camera bump on the top right, but it’s still remarkably stable when used flat on a table. 

Moving to the sides, you get a red-accented power button and a volume rocker on the top left side. There’s no inbuilt fingerprint reader on the power button or anywhere else on the tablet, so you will have to rely on face-unlock for biometrics. Since there’s no secure, Face-ID like 3D face-scanning, you can’t use biometrics for authenticator apps or passkeys.

The Micro-SD and SIM card slots can be found on the bottom left corner. Dual-SIM is supported, but you can’t use an E-SIM with this tablet. There’s unfortunately no 3.5mm headphone jack. 

The USB-C port sits on the right side. It’s a USB 3.0 port and you can actually output a display signal via an HDMI adapter. Sadly, there’s no inbuilt desktop-mode or even display extension, so you can only mirror the display to an external monitor.

Display and Speakers

It’s nice that Alldocube doesn’t cut corners at all when it comes to the display. The iPlay Mini has an 8,8’’, 2560x1600p LCD panel. That means that the image is very sharp at 343 PPI. A lot sharper than the Galaxy Tab A11 with only 179 PPI. The panel isn’t just sharp, it’s also relatively bright at a 500 nits peak. That makes it great for using indoors, although you’ll have to keep expectations in check when using it under the sun. It’s possible, but very straining on the eyes. 

Positively, the viewing angles are very stable and it even has up to 144Hz refresh rate. Though you’ll have to enable that in the display settings. With that, animations are super smooth when scrolling or navigating through menus. Using the automatic refresh mode limits the peak refresh rate at 120Hz, which still feels very fluid. And the tablet can save power by dropping the refresh rate down to 30Hz when idle. 

The colours of the display are very vibrant and saturated, and contrast is good for an LCD too. Watching YouTube or Netflix is really nice here, especially since the tablet has a 16:10 aspect ratio, leaving only very small black bars on the top and bottom sides when streaming. Widevine L1 is supported and works properly, too. 

The left and right dual speakers of the Alldocube are less impressive in comparison. While they get very loud, there’s very little bass at all. They’re pretty clear, at least. Voice-calling and watching YouTube video essays works fine.

Is It a Good Phablet? 

The real winner feature on the iPlay 80 Mini is that you can almost use it as a normal smartphone. There’s practically no competition in the market for an 8,8’’ phablet right now, besides the Samsung Galaxy Tab A11. And that device feels way too slow for daily use. 

Once my SIM was in, the Alldocube immediately started receiving a 5g signal. We didn’t experience any connectivity issues, though the environment also wasn’t particularly challenging. You can make and receive standard phone calls over your carrier with no issue. Which is something that even the LTE iPad Mini isn’t able to do.

On that note, it’s a massive shame that Alldocube didn’t go with an earpiece speaker for the top speaker. That means that calls will always default to speakerphone mode; that’s not really ideal in public. You will pretty much need bluetooth earphones to use this tablet in an actual call. 

Positively, the iPlay Mini Ultra has full GPS functionality for navigation, and even supports haptic feedback and vibration notifications, which is a very rare feature in any tablet. You can also enable these in games that support haptics.

Cameras

The front camera sits in the top display bezel in portrait mode, which is nice since your face will actually be centered in a videocall. It’s a 5mp module, so videos are limited to FHD 30p. There’s no autofocus either. Selfies taken with it are quite soft, but usable. Selfie videos look very grainy though.

The rear camera has a 13MP resolution and you can record videos in 4k 30p. The camera is fine for quick snapshots, the pictures come out alright with good lighting. However, we found that the autofocus software is buggy when recording video, and it doesn’t know what to correctly focus on when panning the camera. That means rear camera videos are practically unusable. 

Software 

One of the biggest issues with smaller tablet manufacturers like Alldocube is that there’s usually very little software and security support after the tablet releases. The iPlay 80 Mini Ultra comes with Android 16 out of the box, which is good. But it’s only going to get upgraded to Android 17, and most likely won’t see any OTA updates after that. That means that you’ll likely be vulnerable to security flaws that would usually be patched out via security upgrades. It’s bad news if you’re planning on storing your passwords and personal data on the tablet. 

That wouldn’t be a massive dealbreaker if you could just install some other Android version like LineageOS once support ends, but the bootloader is locked on this tablet, so you can’t. 

Besides those issues, this Alldocube tablet actually has solid software. There are no sponsored or redundant apps when you first set it up; you’re greeted by the basic Google Apps nearly every Android device comes with. The system design, animations and UI look nice, since it’s just the basic Android 16 design. 

Conclusion

All-in-all, the Alldocube iPlay 80 Mini Ultra is practically uncontested in its niche. There’s no other fast, 8,8’’ 5g gaming tablet that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. The Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 costs more than double, and doesn’t even have 5g. The closest it gets is with the iPad Mini, but the 5g model can’t even make standard phone calls. 

The Alldocube is also good as a portable reading and streaming device. It has a great display, and cellular connection so you can stay in the loop. The tablet only has one big issue, and that’s the 1 year of support and the locked bootloader. So make sure you’re OK with that before buying. 

If you want a mini tablet that just does its job, we really recommend checking out our review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab A11. There’s a model with 4g, and it gets a whole 7 years of software updates and patches.