Oukitel OT8 review - Budget tablet with long battery life, LTE and plenty of space

Our test sample of the Oukitel OT8 is encased in a grey metal frame and has a back in the same color, also made of metal. The camera module with its two massive openings has shiny red accents. Behind it is only a much smaller camera lens and the LED flash.

The design looks modern, and the edges around the screen on the front are not too wide either. This means you can still hold the tablet comfortably in your hand without constantly accidentally touching the touchscreen.

The stability of the case is rather mediocre: if you twist the tablet a little, you can hear a distinct clicking noise, and the screen module sometimes shifts slightly under the frame. However, the rigidity is okay for the price range, and the workmanship is fine.

The tablet comes with 6 GB of RAM, which is quite ample compared to similarly priced tablets. You also rarely see 256 GB of mass storage in this price range. There is no NFC, but the two SIM slots are on board, which means that a mobile network for Internet access and even phone calls is available.

The microSD slot shares a slot with a SIM card. Here you have to decide whether you would use a dual SIM or a SIM and a microSD card. Overall, the card reader performs at a class-leading level in terms of transfer rates in conjunction with our Angelbird V60 reference card. However, the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ shows that even higher data rates are possible here.

The tablet offers WiFi 5 as the fastest standard. In our tests with the Asus ROG Rapture AXE11000 reference router, the data rates via Wi-Fi are at a class level of around 300 - 350 MBit/s and relatively stable, even after several repetitions. The tablet cannot fully utilize a gigabit Internet connection, but the WLAN is fast enough for everyday use without large downloads.

The LTE network can also be used for Internet access, and several frequencies are available. However, when traveling further, especially to the USA or Mexico, you should check whether the tablet supports the corresponding bands, which Oukitel also recommends on its website. During our test, the reception in urban areas was good but not quite at the level of high-end smartphones.

The manufacturer installs Android 13 on the tablet and hardly makes any changes to the system. The security patches were from November 2023 at the time of testing, and are therefore older. Third-party software is not pre-installed. Fortunately, the tablet supports Google's DRM standard Widevine L1, so streaming services can be viewed without resolution restrictions.

Although the touchscreen only works with a maximum sampling rate of 120 Hz and the display can only show a maximum of 60 frames per second, operation is still reasonably smooth. The low system performance, which occasionally leads to waiting times when unlocking, is more of a hindrance.

A stylus is included in the package, although this is only a passive model, i.e. without a Bluetooth connection to the device. You can use it to make entries and navigate more precisely than with your finger. However, there is no pressure level recognition, for example, for different brush strokes in painting and drawing apps.

The inexpensive tablet does not have a fingerprint sensor but does have facial recognition via the front camera. This works without an infrared sensor, so it is not quite as secure as more expensive solutions. However, it works reliably and reasonably quickly once a face has been stored.

With its 11-inch display and a Full HD resolution slightly expanded to 16:10 format, the screen is on par with similarly priced tablets. However, the maximum brightness is less than 400 cd/m², which makes the device inferior to Samsung or Xiaomi.

As long as you are indoors, this will usually not be a major issue, but in the garden or outside in a café, the resulting reflections on the display can make it difficult to see the screen content.

We did not notice PWM flickering even at very low brightness levels. In our tests with the spectrophotometer and the CalMAN software, we detected a clear blue cast in the display, with bright blue and green tones in particular being quite distorted. Overall, the colors appear somewhat dull.

The Unisoc T606 is not exactly known as a performance champion and tends to be used in very inexpensive cell phones and tablets. This means that the Oukitel OT8 is usually only at the bottom of the comparison field. The graphics performance is also low, so gamers should look elsewhere.

The memory, on the other hand, is surprisingly fast: The manufacturer relies on UFS 2.2 flash, which is also used in many mid-range cell phones and helps tablet to clearly outperform the comparison devices. The slow processor does not always make quick loading times possible here either, but the fast internal memory can at least compensate for the deficits a little.

Heating under prolonged load is hardly noticeable on the case surface, and the 3DMark stress tests also show that the performance remains at a very stable level.

The tablet has four speakers, and they can get quite loud. They also sound decent overall and can even make some low mids audible. External audio devices can also be connected via the 3.5 mm jack or Bluetooth 5.0. With aptX HD and LDAC, two higher-quality codecs are also supported for wireless audio transmission.

At 8,800 mAh, the battery has a very high capacity and also achieved very good runtimes of just over 18 hours in our WLAN test. This means that nothing should stand in the way of a rainy day with the Oukitel OT8 without charging. If the tablet does need to be plugged in, it can be charged with up to 18 watts; a full charge takes approximately 4 hours.

The Oukitel OT8 can be purchased directly from the manufacturer for just under 160 euros.

At amazon.de, the tablet costs 199 euros at the time of testing, but there is a voucher for 20 euros that you can redeem.