Review: Sharp Dtab D-41A

I think I bought this tablet around November 2024, from everyone’s favorite OK shop. The reason was simple: I wanted a tablet, and the only goal was watching videos. Ideally stock Android, able to install GMS, and not a Chinese brand…

The price at OK at the time was hard to refuse — a bit over 300, under 400, and the condition was decent, so I grabbed it.

The specs aren’t high, but they’re enough: Snapdragon 665, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage, a 10.1-inch screen. For a video-watching tablet that’s more than plenty, and the performance isn’t bad either. I remember playing a few rounds of Honor of Kings after it arrived — light entertainment works fine.

Once you have it in hand, if you’ve got a way to get around the Great Firewall and your proxy is in Japan, you can receive system updates — you can even go all the way from an early Android version up to Android 12. I don’t think there were updates after that. Android 12 is pretty much the best this tablet can do: the system gets the new color scheme, and the underlying API level is new enough that there are no app compatibility issues.

Honestly though, accessories for this tablet are a real pain to buy. I eventually found what I needed on AliExpress — a screen protector and a case. AliExpress claims to be international, but most of it ships from Shenzhen anyway, and if your address is in mainland China they’ll just send it via SF Express.

As a pure video-watching tablet, after nearly two years of on-and-off use, I’m basically satisfied. The screen colors are actually pretty decent. The shortcomings are obvious too: on one hand the performance is lacking, but I don’t care about that; on the other, maybe the tablet is just old? Operations involving I/O reads and writes visibly slow down.

Finally, since it’s a Japanese tablet product, you need to do a lot of debloating and optimization out of the box to make sure it’s usable.

At the time it felt like amazing value for the price. Looking at it now, that price isn’t actually a good deal — either times have moved on, or the competition has just gotten more brutal.