TECNO MEGAPAD 11 tablet review: time of the first

There is no point in listing reviews of smartphones – we have a lot of them, and in general, TECNO has been represented in this area since 2013. Accessories came later – headphones under this brand appeared in the 2020s; we recently talked about the company’s new series of headsets. The company has been producing laptops since 2022, starting with the successful MEGABOOK T1 model and then developing its success quite qualitatively.

Actually, the tablets that are debuting now are also “MEGA”. We meet TECNO MEGAPAD 11 – yes, his name is spelled that way, entirely in caps. This is a lower middle class (but not entry-level) tablet, with an 11-inch screen (as is easy to understand from the name), the MediaTek Helio G99 platform (legend), an LTE modem (and, accordingly, a SIM card slot), and 8000 mAh battery. Let’s see if MEGAPAD 11 managed to stand out from its numerous competitors?

⇡#Specifications

⇡#Design and construction

With the design of tablets, as a rule, the situation is even more boring and sad than with the design of smartphones (where you have to measure the shapes of camera blocks in order to somehow distinguish them from each other). A large rectangle is a screen on the front, a plain surface on the back, and even the camera block, due to its small (relative to the rest of the body) dimensions, does not help. But TECNO MEGAPAD 11 looks quite interesting against the general background.

Simply thanks to the courage of the designers to make the back panel not monochromatic, but as if visually divided into two zones: one with a solid fill, and the second ribbed; The block with the camera was located on it. Yes, in the singular, although visually it seems that there are at least two of them. The second “burner” is occupied by the flash.

The front of the TECNO MEGAPAD 11 is just more than usual – very large frames around the display, into which the front camera fits. Moreover, the frames are heterogeneous: the top and bottom are thicker than the sides. It looks acceptable, but I won’t say that the tablet is elegant.

The dimensions are quite normal for an 11-inch tablet. Thickness is 7.6 mm, weight – 510 grams. The body is made partly of glass (front panel), partly of aluminum (most of the back panel), and partly of plastic (edges and top of the back panel).

There are two color variations: gray (the one we tested) and mint.

The functional elements are as expected. A pair of hardware keys (power and volume control), speaker grilles (there are four of them, according to the number of speakers), a USB Type-C port, a mini-jack (nowadays a rarity, even on tablets) and two microphones.

⇡#Software

TECNO MEGAPAD 11 runs on Android 14 operating system, no surprises here. But what happens next is more interesting. When you first start the tablet, you are prompted to select a software environment – either standard (HiOS, but version 13.0) or a special children’s environment. Typically, tablets have a special children’s area with a password and restrictions on applications and operating time, but here there is a separate shell.

The usual shell clearly shows TECNO’s inexperience in creating tablets. There is a whole complex of factors here: there is no quick access panel to applications that is usual on other tablets, the icons are too small, the display orientation changes unstable (on the main desktop, for example, it does not change at all, in the camera application – partially; and in the settings menu it changes, but looks This menu is a little crooked). There are also some errors not related to the format, such as the color of the fonts under application icons, which does not adapt to the background image, but always remains black (you can only forcefully activate the “high-contrast text” parameter in the settings, and the black font will receive a light outline – but in the entire interface, not just the desktop). Of the special tablet functionality (in addition to the two environments available for work), we can only note the ability to work with two applications simultaneously on a split screen.

The system works stably and quite quickly (Helio G99 is still in force), takes up 15 GB of memory.

There are no methods of user identification other than the old-fashioned ones, such as entering a password or a pattern; there is no fingerprint scanner, nor is there a facial recognition system.

Display and sound

TECNO MEGAPAD 11 has an LCD display with an IPS matrix with a diagonal of exactly 11 inches and a resolution of 1920 × 1200 pixels (Full HD+). The pixel density is 206 pixels per inch, which is not outstanding, but we don’t see overt pixelation, the picture is relatively “smooth.”

The screen operates with an increased refresh rate – up to 90 Hz, scrolling actually feels smoother (in fact, it is quite difficult to distinguish between 120 and 90 hertz by eye, unlike 60 and 90 hertz, for example). In games, increased frequencies are not supported, but in any case you shouldn’t count on the MEGAPAD 11 as a gaming device – it is primarily a multimedia tablet. The oleophobic coating is average – this is critical for a tablet – the screen actively collects fingerprints, but erasing them is not always easy.

The measured maximum brightness level (under incandescent light) is 455 cd/m2. For a tablet, this is an acceptable level; you can use it outdoors, but not in sunny weather, when the picture will already fade. The contrast level is sufficient – 1504:1.

The display settings, in fact, are the bare minimum: the already mentioned font adjustment, where in addition to increasing the contrast, you can change its size and boldness, a light or dark theme (for an LCD screen – a purely decorative solution), an eyesight protection mode with warm tones (here’s why – this is called “Night Light”), the refresh rate setting (fixed at 60 or 90 Hz or changed automatically – the latter parameter is used by default). There are no color rendering settings, you can’t even change the color temperature, not to mention presets and finer color settings.

TECNO MEGAPAD 11, gamma. Yellow line – TECNO MEGAPAD 11 indicators, dotted line – reference range

TECNO MEGAPAD 11, color temperature. Blue line – TECNO MEGAPAD 11 indicators, dotted line – reference temperature

TECNO MEGAPAD 11, color gamut. Gray triangle – sRGB coverage, white triangle – TECNO MEGAPAD 11 coverage

The color gamut of the TECNO MEGAPAD 11 display is close to the sRGB standard, but with a slight offset, and the gamut itself is slightly wider. The average gamma is normal (2.18), but the curves deviate from the standard in light shades. The color temperature is seriously increased – at the level of 8,100-8,200 K, colors are much cooler than normal. The average deviation for the extended Color Checker palette (shades of gray + a wide range of color shades) is 4.64 with the upper limit of the norm being 3. If MEGAPAD 11 was intended for professional use, the tablet would be strongly criticized for such a level of customization, but for a multimedia device – quite acceptable.

TECNO MEGAPAD 11 received an analog connector and a Bluetooth 5.2 module with support for the LDAC profile, but without aptX support (after all, this is a MediaTek platform). There are four speakers here at once, we can talk not about a simple stereo effect, but about a certain desire for surround sound – especially since there is Dolby Atmos certification.

⇡#«Hardware “and performance, wireless connections

TECNO MEGAPAD 11 received the MediaTek Helio G99 hardware platform. Released in 2022, it is still by far the most common on smartphones in the budget and mid-range segments, but we have not yet seen it on tablets. But these are exclusively our problems; in fact, a special tablet version of the platform (MediaTek MT8781) is found on more than 80 tablets. We just don’t test devices like this very often.

MediaTek Helio G99 consists of eight computing cores: two ARM Cortex-A76 clocked at 2.2 GHz and six ARM Cortex-A55 clocked at 2.0 GHz. The graphics are handled by an ARM Mali-G57 MC2 clocked at 950 MHz. The technological process is conventional 6 nm. There is no 5G modem.

The performance is enough for the system to work quickly and to launch (and run at a reasonable frame rate) any current games. Without gloss, ray tracing and a huge reserve of power for the future, but “right now” is more than acceptable.

There is no throttling, resource tests do not reveal a decrease in frequencies at all (everything is within 1% – this is a statistical error). There is also no tendency to overheat, the tablet remains at most warm even under serious load.

TECNO MEGAPAD 11 is available in two versions: with the same 8 GB of RAM and 128 or 256 GB storage. There is a slot for a MicroSD memory card with a capacity of up to 1 TB.

Card tray

But there is a slot for a SIM card, which is rare for a tablet in the price category to which the TECNO MEGAPAD 11 belongs. The tablet supports 4G networks; the list of ranges is unknown, but there is no reason to believe that something important is missing there. Other wireless modules: the already mentioned Bluetooth version 5.2, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (the tablet is not compatible with Wi-Fi 6), a navigation module with support for GPS (A-GPS), Beidou, Galileo and GLONASS . No NFC.

⇡#Camera

The cameras in the tablet serve, let’s say, more of a technical function – the front one for video calls, the back one for taking some documentation and the same calls, well, occasionally to shoot something artistically, if suddenly you don’t have a smartphone at hand, but you have a tablet (for me It’s hard to imagine such a situation in the modern world).

Rear camera TECNO MEGAPAD 11

At the same time, the cameras are not here for show. The rear module has a 13-megapixel sensor with an autofocus lens with an aperture of ƒ/2.0 and the ability to shoot 2K video.

Front camera TECNO MEGAPAD 11

The front camera is equipped with an 8-megapixel sensor and a fixed-focus lens with an aperture of ƒ/2.0. It shoots video in the same resolution (2K), which is quite important – often in tablets they “cut down” the front camera in this regard, although for a tablet it is perhaps even more important than the rear module.

Examples of shooting with the rear camera of TECNO MEGAPAD 11

There is a 2x software zoom, there is an option to software enhance images using AI (can be disabled, but it is enabled by default – and above are examples of shooting with this option) and the ability to shoot with HDR (also activated by default). There are no options for special night shooting or manual settings, nor is there a mode for shooting documents or scanning QR codes, which would be useful for a tablet. But you can shoot portraits with background blur or retouching – a standard story for TECNO gadgets with the separation of these functions.

The camera application is standard for HiOS, but with a much smaller number of options (in addition to those mentioned above, we also note stitching panoramas and shooting time-lapses) and minimal adaptation for a large screen – the icons are scattered across it correctly, but the sizes could (and should) be larger .

Examples of shooting with a selfie camera

All the same options are available for the front camera as for the rear one, but instead of taking a panorama, there is approximately the same function called “Wide Selfie”. There are two focal lengths available (for basic mode and retouching mode – one focal length is available when blurring the background) and the same split portrait mode.

⇡#Autonomy

TECNO MEGAPAD 11 received a battery with a capacity of 30.4 Wh (8000 mAh, 3.8 V). This is quite enough for a tablet with a similar screen diagonal to hold a charge for a long time. In particular, the MEGAPAD 11 plays video at maximum brightness (with Wi-Fi turned on) for almost nine hours. This is quite a decent figure; it’s not enough for a transatlantic flight, but now there are almost no such options – but to Istanbul, for example, it’s more than enough. But if the flight is long-distance, then you can lower the brightness, and the flight mode will slightly reduce energy consumption.

The package includes an 18 W charger – with it you can fully charge the tablet in about three hours. Wireless charging is not supported. There are also no interesting charging options that are already common for TECNO; here, however, the functionality of the shell (and hardware) is noticeably reduced.

⇡#Conclusion

TECNO MEGAPAD 11 is quite interesting as an inexpensive multimedia tablet, especially if you keep in mind that this is TECNO’s first experience in a new niche. There’s a pretty good screen with a higher refresh rate (but the setup isn’t ideal, and it’s still a little lacking in brightness), an interesting design, which is rare for a tablet, a good hardware platform that allows you to partly rely on the “megapad” as a gaming device, four speakers combined with an analog audio jack and an LTE modem, which provides the device with more than just bedside use potential.

But if you can’t find fault with the hardware, then the shell requires improvement – it lacks adaptation to the tablet and additional functionality taking into account the large screen. As for the lack of a keyboard case and stylus support, it is worth considering the status of the model – its characteristics are quite good in its niche.