Tbook 11 E5A6 – some thoughts after using for 2 weeks

[Rob De Wet]

I’ve been playing around with the Teclast TBook 11  2-in-1 for about 10 days now and have some overall observations. The first of which is that the basic hardware is a very good compromise between cost , performance and quality.

From previous experience the worst aspect of these Chinese tablets or mini laptops is the screen. It’s the easiest way to keep the price low. But here Teclast has used the Samsung high-resolution screen with Gorilla glass – bright and clear and no need for a screen protector. But there seems to have been a price to pay for this in other areas. Like the terrible little on-board digital sound chip, which makes the sound quality so bad you can’t listen with headphones. Or the useless barely audible built-in speakers.

But the worst thing overall is that these tablets have been set up with the onboard software via a production line which knocks them all out as fast as possible and with minimal system checks afterwards. They seem to be using a factory-standardised disk image which is just thrown onto the memory chip. The first thing to see is that running ‘computer management’ from Windows reveals that the little 64 MB chip has 15 partitions on it (insane!), with 9 of them having nothing on them at all and some as small as 1 MB. This needs addressing right away and  would free-up some significant storage space.

The other- and really irritating thing – is that the system setting after the factory software install has obviously been changed to English. And this means that 95% of everything is in English. BUT the original software and settings install was done in Chinese – resulting in a lot of sidebar headings and menu headers still being in Chinese.

Anther huge frustration is that there’s no documentation with the tablet except for a silly little generic instruction book about what the buttons and controls do and basic things like how to set the date and time. There’s no info about the fact the tablet is already set up to work with Microsoft Store, for example, or that MS Office is installed (the 365 cutdown version) but that you need to open an account with MS Store and register before you can activate and use any of these things. Or, more importantly, that it is impossible to run Google Chrome: yes, it will just about stagger to open the main browsing window with one tab open. But opening links in a new tab just drains the tablet’s resources and Chrome comes to a halt.

But by far the most annoying thing of all is this: the tablet is loudly advertised as coming with Windows 10 installed and activated. But the version is the first incarnation of Windows 10 (version 1511) and its the one that’s riddled with flaws and bugs. MS Edge won’t import Chrome bookmarks, for example, not will it install add-ons or extensions – which effectively makes it as useless as the old Internet Explorer 6 from the days of Windows XP – and many of you reading this will never have used XP and maybe never even heard of it! No matter how fast Edge is claimed to be, in this version of Windows 10 it’s semi-crippled.

And removing some of the already-set-up useless crap from the Metro screen and replacing it with something that you’re actually going to use then kills the colours and the live tiles – making this (admittedly cosmetic) aspect similarly a disappointment.

So let’s scrap version 1511 and upgrade to the much more functional 1607 Anniversary version instead? After all, Microsoft had a year of embarrassing complaints to correct in a highly flawed operating system. Mmmm. it’s a major upgrade and, reading through these forums, 33% of the posts are crying about bricked tablets and problems from trying to sort this out. Apart from anything else, even if this is successful, it will put your tablet back to what amounts to a factory reset and all your personal settings will be lost – and also I think you’ll need to re-install and configure all your 3rd party software all over again – but I may be wrong about this last one.

And the drivers? Well we HOPE that the current drivers will still work with version 1607. Some people have said that using Double Driver to extract their current drivers then re-install them after an upgrade works fine; others have had problems. (Don’t bother with trying to download anything from the Teclast website unless you can read Chinese.)

Because there’s ZERO support from Teclast. Their entire website is in Chinese, which is insane seeing that they are marketing their products all over the world. Just this one fact alone speaks volumes about the integrity of Teclast – or the lack of it. Their sole aim seem to be to smack out their products at the lowest cost and with the highest turnover. Full stop – end of story.

Sadly they have tried to make this tablet appeal to everyone of all ages, from kids playing games on their Android tabs, to teenagers wanting something to use at college, to adults wanting a mini laptop for business use. And that’s possible – but not at $180. The basic hardware can barely handle the chopped-down version of MS Office – never mind about the amount of storage space it takes up with the Android OS sitting in there too.

So when I get the courage – and the time (I reckon a week to 10 days) – I’m going to do an image-based backup of the Windows partition just to be safe and then re-format the drive. Then try to install version 1607. I couldn’t care less about Android – I have a 7-inch Galaxy Tab and a Note 4 phone I can play on if I want. But to have at least 40 GB of storage space and Windows that actually works effectively seems to be the absolute minimum expectations of a device like this – don’t you think? And as things stand, this just isn’t so.

Maybe a starting point would be for Teclast to write an English version of their website – seeing that they so desperately want to sell stuff outside of China? Cut out the sponsorship and production of faked-up YouTube reviews that make their products sound amazing – because as things stand, they aren’t. And then pay a couple of service people who can speak English to be on hand in a forum to give technical advice. Who cares if it means an extra 1% increase on each product to pay for this. At least they’d start to look as if they gave a shit.

Teclast take note of these points and get your act straight!

[józsef lászló]

You can reach the Teclast site simply typing teclast.com and change the Chinese to English (upper line). For my Tbook 10 the last firmware(?) is dated September ’16 (identical code with the July release, though…).

[Rob De Wet]

Thanks for letting me know – I didn’t realise this.

But checking the drivers available for download for the E5A6, I see it’s about 250 MB altogether. Seeing that Double Driver extracted 593 MB of drivers from my tablet – and they all look like system drivers –  I’m not inspired by confidence!

[Stern]

Welcome to the world of this tbook 11 decidedly very cheap, small question : Does the TF card work under Windows10?

[Rob De Wet]

It actually uses a micro SD card. I’m using a 64 GB class 10 card and I’ve had no trouble at all with it.

[Author]

Posts