ASUS Z10 Tablet

A while back I picked up a piece of junk off Taobao, from the seller I always buy from.

It’s an ASUS Z10 tablet. Junk, probably, but in surprisingly good condition.

The rough specs: Snapdragon 652, 3GB of RAM, a TF card slot, and LTE. The LTE only takes China Telecom SIMs, but I found the China Mobile card I had on me actually worked.

The screen is about iPad-tier, and it’s also 4:3. The system is Android 7.1. ASUS officially says the tablet will get Android 8.0 eventually, but there’s still no word…

But hey, they said it, so I guess we just wait.

I’ve used this thing for a decent while now, and the advantages are pretty obvious: the battery lasts forever… and it supports LTE, even if it’s Telecom-only.

Everything else is also an advantage. The ROM is barely different from stock, so just use it however you’d use stock.

Accessories for this tablet are a pain to find. Not a single screen protector on Taobao has an oleophobic coating, so you’ll have to import one from Ebay yourself. Cases are plentiful, but make sure you buy the one for model Zt500kl P001, or the cutouts won’t line up.

Of course, the tablet has one fatal flaw: it has physical buttons, and the back button sits in the touch area below the screen, but there’s no… backlight. So at night you’ll hit the wrong one. You can fix this by turning on the on-screen nav bar, except you can’t do that without Root… just live with it.

All in all, for a big-screen tablet you use for reading and watching Youtube, with the exact same size and screen ratio as an iPad, plus LTE — junk it may be, but the condition is great and it only cost around 900 yuan. Already a steal.