Budget Surface Alternative: Our Alldocube iWork GT Ultra Review

Everyone knows the Windows tablet formula by now. Microsoft releases a new Surface, the price is way too steep and only enthusiasts end up buying it. Microsoft’s Surface pen and keyboard are good, but expensive too. However, Alldocube is trying to shake the market up with the new iWork GT Ultra windows tablet.

To say that this device is exciting is an understatement. It’s a Windows 11 tablet with a relatively modern Intel chipset, solid looking specs and most importantly, it comes with the stylus and keyboard out the box for a reasonable 899 Euro price. Now that’s something.

So we put this device through its paces over the last month by using it for taking notes, watching videos and yes, even playing demanding games in order to answer the ultimate question: Is it the best Microsoft Surface alternative?

Design and Build

The iWork GT Ultra uses a magnesium-aluminium alloy body. It’s a unibody design with a Surface-stylus kickstand at the back that allows you to adjust the angle up to a 155 degree tilt. The kickstand doesn’t feel as smooth to open or as sturdy as the one on the Microsoft Surface, but it keeps the angle well and the hinge looks robust.

Since this is a Windows tablet with a power-hungry Intel chip, it’s not going to be as light and thin as an iPad or Android tablet. The iWork GT Ultra is 9,89mm thick and weighs a good 850 grams. For a tablet, that’s very bulky. 

The power button is on the left of the top side. Right across it is the volume rocker. You’ll notice the two stripes of cutouts for the fans to cool the internals, and opposing cutouts for the speakers on the left and right side. It’s an interesting and somewhat industrial looking design that might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But those cooling vents are necessary. More on that in a second. 

The port selection here is rich for a tablet, but poor by laptop standards. The left side packs the 2 USB-C ports with USB 3.1 speed for charging, data transfer, display output and whatever else you fancy. It’s not a Thunderbolt port though. The right side has a solitary USB Type-A port with USB 3.0 speeds. 

At the very bottom edge, you’ll find the 5 pogo-pin connector used for attaching the keyboard to the tablet. 

In general, we find the iWork GT Ultra pretty well manufactured, but not nearly as premium feeling as Microsoft’s Surface lineup. The hinge is a bit stiff, and the build material feels plasticy despite using metal. If you really appreciate the Surface Pro series for their design, quality materials and prestige, the Alldocube probably isn’t the thing for you. 

Cameras

There’s a 5 MP rear camera on an elevated camera bump, and a 5 MP front facing camera buried within the bezel. These are pretty much exactly what you expect for this price. The pictures using the rear camera come out looking fine, if not a little bit blurry and grainy when you zoom into details, even in daylight. Selfies look quite natural and sharp.

Videos can be recorded at 2k 30p, and the results are actually great. Much better than a usual Windows laptop. For video calls, the Alldocube is perfect. 

Display and Speakers

The iWork GT Ultra’s display is a real highlight. It’s a 13’’, 2560×1600 glossy IPS panel. Sure, it’s not an OLED display like the top-end Microsoft Surface, but it’s very sharp and gets pretty bright with 500 nits of standard brightness. That means you can use it in bright offices and even outdoors as long as you avoid direct sunlight or overhead lights that reflect off the screen. It comes with a preapplied screen protector, but it’s quite low quality so we removed it before testing.

The display refresh rate is 60Hz, which is enough in our opinion. And of course it supports multi-touch and stylus input as well. All around, it’s a perfectly good tablet display.

The speakers on the Alldocube are perfectly serviceable for YouTube or video-calling. Even listening to music sounds pleasant on these, although you of course won’t have deep, resolving bass or the most feeling of space. We just wish they would get a bit louder; it’s hard to use it as a YouTube hub while cooking with all the kitchen noise in the background.  

Performance and Specs

The GT Ultra comes with Intel’s 2 years old Core Ultra 5 125H processor. It’s a 14 core, 18 threaded chip with a 7-core Arc iGPU that focuses on power efficiency instead of pure performance. 

The RAM and storage aren’t user upgradable, but you get 16 GB of DDR5 memory and a 1 TB SSD, which is plenty. That’s also a lot more than the 256 GB SSD the cheapest Microsoft Surface Pro 12 comes with.

For usual tasks like web browsing, editing PDFs or taking notes, the tablet is super responsive. And you won’t even run into performance issues when editing videos or photos. Gaming is the only scenario we’ve tested where the performance doesn’t feel like enough. 

Speaking of editing, we decided to test how this humble laptop handles 8k Blackmagic RAW footage in Davinci Resolve. Surprisingly, scrolling through the timeline and making trims and cuts happens without delay. Applying colour grades, blur effects and setting playback at full resolution works smoothly. That’s with a small project, we don’t recommend it as a premium editing machine, of course, but it’s still impressive.

Our main worry about performance is just how hot the chassis of the GT Ultra gets when you’re doing anything demanding. The fans spin up and get quite loud, and the back of the tablet feels uncomfortably hot. That’s not a good sign if you want fast, sustained performance out of the machine. 

Let’s take a look at benchmarks. In Geekbench 6, the GT Ultra is only 15% slower than the Microsoft Surface Pro 11 in CPU single-core, which is pretty impressive considering that the Surface is using a much newer chipset. The Allducube is 30% slower than the Surface in CPU multi-core, though. 

Of course, you have to remember that the new Microsoft Surface tablets use Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, which don’t have native compatibility with many Windows apps. If you specifically need an Intel processor on a new Windows tablet, the iWork GT Ultra is one of the few choices on the market. 

Samsung’s premium Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip is a good 30% faster in single core and 20% faster in CPU multi-core even though its chip is just a year newer. 

3DMark’s range of graphics benchmarks give us an idea of how the Alldocube performs in GPU heavy tasks. In Wildlife Extreme, the GT Ultra is actually 26% faster than the Surface Pro 12. The Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 is just 5% faster than the GT Ultra here. 

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Gaming

Obviously, nobody buys a Windows tablet for gaming. But that doesn’t mean you can’t play the occasional game when you want to relax on the train or something. 

To test gaming performance, we first start with Civilisations VI. The game isn’t new, and runs fairly well on every system we’ve tested recently. Here’s where we encountered a strange bug. When you start Civ on the GT Ultra, the game rotates 90 degrees, and there’s no way to flip it back. Mouse inputs stop registering and the touchscreen doesn’t work either. So you can’t actually play the game, or at least we haven’t found any way to. We didn’t encounter this bug when playing Civ on the Microsoft Surface Pro 11, it seems to be an Alldocube driver issue.

Unlike Civ VI, Counter Strike 2 actually starts up without any problems. By default, the game will use the 2.5k native resolution of the tablet, and you can barely navigate the menu at that resolution. Changing the resolution to 1440x900p makes it run much better. We selected the “low” graphics preset for this test and played a couple rounds of deathmatch. The average FPS was 65, which is playable and above the displays’s 60Hz refresh rate anyways.

Moving onto a newer title, we tested Bungee’s Marathon. This is a considerably more demanding game to run, and to nobody’s surprise, the average FPS is just 36. Honestly we didn’t know whether to be impressed that it runs at all or depressed about the low framerate. If you have a good internet connection, using a cloud gaming service like Nvidia Geforce Now might be a better idea for these kinds of games instead of running them locally. But since the display is 60Hz, you won’t have the best competitive experience anyways. 

Battery Life and Charging

Alldocube lists the GT Ultra’s battery as a 42.72Wh “smart” battery. It’s a good capacity, but we have no clue what smart means in this context. The tablet comes with a 100W power adapter, but of course you can use a generic USB-C charger to charge the tablet at up to 65 Watts. 

We notice that the tablet gets concerningly warm when charging. Even when idle in Windows, the fans start spinning up audibly and the back frame gets hot to the touch. The charging speed is very quick, though.

We test battery life by running an HD YouTube Video in a loop with the tablet set at max brightness. The iWork GT Ultra only lasts 4 hours and 30 minutes before running out, which is a very weak result compared to pretty much any modern tablet or laptop. The Microsoft Surface Pro 12 lasts 9 hours and 36 minutes, so more than double as long. And more recent Intel powered laptops like the Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 can stream for as long as 15 hours.

Keyboard Cover

The GT Ultra’s keyboard is just alright. It’s a detachable keyboard that connects to the bottom of the tablet via 2 plastic pegs and 5 pogo pins in the middle. While attached, you can push the keyboard forwards to type from an elevated angle. The keys are full sized and have a standard layout. 

Unfortunately, the Alldocube’s keyboard doesn’t really compare well to something like the Microsoft Surface’s. There’s too much flex when typing, and the keys, while accurate, feel a bit too plasticy. You can sometimes miss an input since it’s hard to tell whether you’ve fully pressed down on a key or not. After typing for a while, you can get used to this keyboard’s feeling, but it’s not something we would use for work full-time.

Beneath the keyboard sits the mini trackpad. It really could be just a bit taller, since you will often run out of space while scrolling around, but otherwise it’s quite ok. The clicks are pretty loud, but they register and the trackpad feels very responsive. So overall, the input devices are usable. 

There’s a little strap on the right bottom side of the keyboard that lets you attach the stylus. It’s a neat design, but you’re going to have to remove the stylus anytime you want to type something longer, since the stylus blocks where your wrist would usually rest when typing. 

Stylus

To be a real competitor against the Surface, the included Alldocube stylus must be good enough for sketching and taking notes. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case here. The touchscreen technically supports up to 4096 pressure sensitivity levels for a USI 2.0 pen, which sounds great for drawing, but the included stylus’ pressure sensitivity doesn’t work in OneNote or Krita.

Other USI pens we tried also weren’t pressure sensitive. Also, it’s just not a very smooth writing experience; lines come out all squiggly and unnaturally sharp. Drawing using this stylus has the same issue. For that reason, we really can’t recommend it for students and artists. It’s ok for marking up a PDF and signing a document. But that’s it.

Read: 10 Best Tablets With Stylus Pen For Drawing & Writing

Conclusion: Not a Surface Killer At This Price 

Compared to the cheapest Microsoft Surface, the Surface Pro 12, the Alldocube iWork GT Ultra appears to be a good deal; after all, it’s 899 Euro for the whole package compared to more than 1000 euros. The storage is 1TB instead of 256GB, and you have native Windows compatibility with a decent Intel processor.

However, we think that most people will still be better off going for the Surface. The Surface simply has better battery life thanks to its Snapdragon Chip and a far better stylus if you’re serious about drawing.

The one exception is if you’re a content creator, photographer or do something else that requires raw power and plenty of RAM and storage like video editing, and would like a touchscreen to speed up your workflow. Or if you need Windows on an Intel chip on a tablet. In that case, we can recommend the Alldocube.

So, if you’re still thinking about which Windows tablet to get, make sure to check out our detailed Microsoft Surface Pro 12 review. We really like the device and it often gets big discounts.

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