Onda V10 4G Review – A Cheap LTE Tablet For Just 100$

The Onda V10 4G is a very inexpensive tablet from China that costs only 109 US Dollars. Its highlights, especially at this price, are integrated LTE, Dual-SIM slots, a full HD display and Android 7.0 Nougat. How good can such a cheap tablet be? That’s what you’ll find out in this review.

Design & Build Quality

As you might expect at this price, the build quality is not the best. It’s completely made out of plastic. While there are tablets out there that offer a worse quality, the Onda V10 4G feels quite cheap. But the build quality itself is actually not too bad. It’s not easy to bend and probably won’t break easily.

I quite like the design. It has a golden back and around the screen are white bezels. Considering the price, it is relatively thin at 8.3 millimeters – thinner than the Amazon Fire HD 10. With 490 grams it’s also not too heavy.

Ports, Cameras, Speakers

The Onda V10 4G has two SIM card slots at the top. So you can use two SIM cards at the same time. There’s also a microSD card slot which can hold cards with a capacity of up to 128GB.

I used the tablet with a SIM card from O2 in Germany. Compared to my Huawei P10 smartphone, I actually didn’t notice any big differences when it comes to reception. That’s a positive surprise.

There are not a lot of ports. Onda is giving us a standard micro USB port and a 3.5-millimeter audio jack. That’s it. On the right side are the power button and the volume controls which are made out of plastic too.

On the front, we’re getting a 2-megapixel camera and the main camera on the back offers a resolution of 5 megapixels. The quality of both cameras is not really good but acceptable if you don’t have too high expectations.

With cheap tablets, we usually don’t get the best sound quality and that’s the case here as well. The two speakers on the back are just usable for YouTube. But I didn’t enjoy watching movies with them and would recommend using headphones or Bluetooth speakers instead.

Display: A Full HD Mirror

The 10.1-inch display has one major highlight and a couple of negative points. At this price, we usually get an HD resolution only. But the Onda V10 4G offers a full HD screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1200. Compared to most competitors, texts and icons look sharp. The color reproduction and brightness are relatively good as well but not as good as the Huawei MediaPad T3 10 that costs just a bit more.

Cheaper tablets often do not offer a fully laminated screen and that is the case here as well. But there is quite a big gap between the IPS panel and the touchscreen – I’d say about a 2-millimeter gap. Because of that, the screen is very reflective and sometimes it doesn’t look as if I hit an icon precisely.

It seems like Onda is not protecting the display with any kind of Gorilla Glass. Instead, they pre-applied a screen protector made out of plastic. The screen protector does not protect the screen from fingerprints though, they are easily visible. It also feels kind of cheap.

So while it’s awesome that we are getting a full HD resolution, the other aspects of the display are not that great. Especially the big gap between the panel and touchscreen is a bit annoying.

Hardware & Performance

Inside the Onda V10 4G runs a MediaTek MT6753 quad-core processor. It’s a chip with eight cores that are clocked at 1.3GHz. In addition to that, we’re getting 2GB of RAM and a 32GB internal storage. As I mentioned earlier, it does support 4G, but also Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac.

Considering the price, the performance is not bad. During my review, Android and apps like Chrome did run smoothly and without any big problems. Small lags are visible only occasionally.

The Onda V10 4G is not a gaming tablet. But you are able to play some games with it. I tried Asphalt Xtreme and I was able to play it very nicely. Yes, the graphics are turned down quite a bit. But you can play it.

I always try Modern Combat 5 as well and while you can play it, I often noticed lags during action-heavy sequences. It is not as bad as on the Lenovo Tab 4 8 (review) or Huawei MediaPad T3 10. If you don’t have high expectations, you can still play it. But, as I said, you will see some lags.

Let’s take a look at a couple of benchmarks. In Geekbench 4 the device gets 590 and 2490 points. That’s not bad at all at this price point. In AnTuTu it gets pretty good results as well – here the tablet gets 38920 points.

Android 7.0 Nougat

It’s great that Onda preinstalled Android 7.0 Nougat. Yes, it would be nice to get Oreo, but a lot of tablets at this price are still running Marshmallow. I don’t expect the V10 4G to ever get an update though.

In my opinion, Android Nougat is quite important on a 10-inch device. Because it enables the split screen view which is activated on the Onda V10 4G. I often used Microsoft Word and Chrome side by side and didn’t encounter any big lags. You might see some if you’ve got tons of tabs open in Chrome at the same time though.

The interface is not customized a lot, which is nice as well. There are some minor design changes, but it basically is vanilla Android. It’s also not overloaded with preinstalled apps – only the usual ones. That includes the Google Play Store and a phone app. Yes, you can make phone calls with this tablet.

Battery Life

How good is the battery life of the Onda V10 4G? In my standard battery test, it got a runtime of 7 hours. Compared to the competition that’s not great at all. Usually, we only see Windows tablets getting a runtime of under 8 hours.

My battery test is always identical. I’m running an HD video over and over again until the tablet shuts itself off. Brightness is set to 50 percent and WiFi is activated.

During normal use, the battery life isn’t better either. As usual, I wrote down a kind of battery diary and got a runtime of 26 hours. That sounds great, but in those 26 hours, I used it actively for 4 hours and 20 minutes only. During that time I mostly watched YouTube and worked with Microsoft Word. Brightness was set to 100 percent and WiFi and Bluetooth were activated.

Onda V10 4G Review – My Final Verdict

So, can I recommend the Onda V10 4G? It feels quite cheap. Well, because it is. But the build quality itself is not too bad. The about 2-millimeter gap between the IPS panel and the touchscreen is annoying and the display is the main reason why I didn’t really enjoy to use this tablet. But considering the price, the performance is decent and it’s great that we get LTE.

And that’s the only reason why I would recommend the Onda V10 4G. If you are looking for a 10-inch tablet with integrated LTE and don’t want to spend much over 100 Dollars. There aren’t any real competitors.

One of the few direct competitors I can think of is the Kodak Tablet 10. It offers a 10-inch screen, integrated 3G, and Nougat. But it has an HD resolution only and costs almost 200 dollars.

If you are just looking for a cheap tablet and don’t need 4G, then I would recommend a couple of competitors though. For example, you can check out the FNF iFive Mini 4S (review) which costs around the same but has a much better display and better performance. The Amazon Fire tablets are a nice alternative as well.