The Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M is a cheap tablet, but exactly how cheap depends on whether you buy it with a keyboard or not. Asus sent us the keyboard-free "solus" version, letting us really get to grips with whether the filling of this sandwich is any good.
The slate costs $179/£149 (roughly AU$240) without the keyboard and around $200/£180/AU$265 with it. Given the high prices you pay for just the keyboard of tablets like the iPad Pro 9.7 and Microsoft Surface Pro 4, the ZenPad seems an obvious bargain hunter pick.
The Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M is severely held back by the same show-stopper that affects similarly-priced Amazon and LG devices, though: the screen resolution is just too damn low. So does the ZenPad 10 Z300M have enough else going for it to overcome its resolution limitations? We answer that below.
Key features and design
- Big screen at a low price
- Plain design but solidly built
The Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M has a 10.1-inch screen, so it's not a super-portable tablet, but combined with the low price of $179/£149 (around AU$240) that big screen is one of the slate's main selling points, since most cheap tablets have just 7 or 8-inch displays. We'll talk about this in more detail in the screen section below, but know that while the size of the screen is impressive, the resolution isn't.
As for design, it's harder to make a tablet stand out than a phone. Make an orange or green phone and people will think it's funky and refreshing. Make an orange tablet and they'll say A) it's for kids or B) you've lost your mind.
Asus worked out its own subtle tablet style a few years ago, and even though this is a bargain basement tablet, the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M tries to look premium, with a back that mostly tries to look like leather, while the bottom section gives the appearance of aluminum.
It's just an effect of course, the lot is plastic, and not the sort of plastic with a soft touch finish or one that feels like another material. You get a high-friction texture, but that's it.
Being just 7.9mm thick is neat but no longer anything to get too excited about - aren't we spoilt - and at 490g the ZenPad 10 Z300M is a bit heavy to try to carry around in one hand.
That a tablet this price feels basic is no revelation, the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M does feel well-made, though. It doesn't flex under hand pressure more than a tablet twice the price, its screen is covered by toughened glass, and there are no wide seams that would suggest the slate's build quality is markedly worse than Asus's other gear.
These days it's rare to see a truly poorly-made gadget, but we always have to check.
Internal storage depends on the country in which you buy the ZenPad 10 Z300M, but the UK version we're reviewing has 16GB. That's pretty generous for the price, and there's also a microSD card slot on one side to add more.
Display
- Low resolution
- Bright and colorful screen
The one piece of hardware that lets the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M down is the screen, and only in one respect too, namely the resolution, which is dismal at 1280 x 800.
You can easily notice the difference between this sort of resolution and 1080p in a 5-inch phone, while in a 10-inch tablet the difference is painfully obvious. Text has a crunchy character, and 3D games appear far more pixelated than they do on a 1080p or higher tablet.
This isn't an "Asus thing". For just a little more money the Asus ZenPad S 8.0 has a 2048 x 1536 resolution - more than three times the number of display pixels as the Z300M. However, ultra-low resolution slates like this seem to be extremely hard to shake off thanks to the number of relatively undiscerning buyers who just want "a cheap tablet".
It's a shame, when a little extra consumer demand for higher quality might see more tablets like the minor classic LG G Pad 8.3 arrive at a low price.
Aside from the Minecraft-effect of the display, image quality is actually decent. Colors are bold enough to make media and games pop, contrast is good and the actual display doesn't appear recessed far beyond the top layer of the screen.
Viewing angles are good too, and top brightness is solid, so in many ways the ZenPad Z300M has a reasonable screen, it's just gagging for a 1920 x 1200 or higher resolution panel.
- Dated interface design
- Lots of unwanted apps
Like all of Asus's own-brand tablets, the ZenPad 10 Z300M has a custom interface plonked on top of Android. In this case it's Android Marshmallow: not the latest version by any means, but at least we're not stuck with Android Lollipop.
Asus's Android interface is among the more disruptive, significantly changing the look and feel of the system even though the basic layout remains the same. You have home screens, you have an apps menu, and the amount you have to skip between them depends on how much you curate your home screens.
The Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M's interface is a little dated, and has been for a few years now, clearly being based on the aesthetics of Android 4.4 rather than Android 6/7. You get the sense Asus has pumped enough money into the interface to convince itself that building on these foundations is a better investment than a full refresh. We're not so sure.
Android 4.4-a-like elements include apps/widgets tabs on the apps menu, and that the standard home screen transition animation is one of those naff 3D ones. They were popular for a while, a few years ago.
Our first ZenPad 10 Z300M tip: change the transitions back to the "classic" style.
Customization is one welcome benefit that Google has largely removed from stock Android since Android 5.0 (although Android 7.0 Nougat adds some back in), but it's present here. You can alter the scaling of icons, apply themes to give the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M a one-tap makeover and, of course, play around with those page turn transitions.
The part that tends to turn people off about the Asus interface is the sheer number of extra bits of software packed in. It's like buying a flat decorated to someone else's tastes, because while some of the extras are inoffensive, neutral tools like a file manager, screen customizer and to-do list, others aren't.
Apps like PhotoCollage and MiniMovie try to "add value", letting you make little photo collages and videos, while ZenCircle is a strange Instagram knock-off. However, they're all a bit rubbish compared to the apps you can download from Google Play.
Asus has also done a deal with EE and Gameloft, that sees some of their apps pre-installed on the ZenPad 10 Z300M. This is a pretty common tactic in cheaper devices, effectively a little advert that helps to subsidize low-cost hardware.
Those gaming apps can be uninstalled at least, but Asus's own ones can only be disabled, meaning they're removed from the app menu but some data remains on the device should you decide to enable them again. From a user's point of view the difference is largely semantic though, given that these are not memory-guzzling apps.
Movies, music and gaming
- Average speakers
- Games run well but look ugly
Given the large harvest of extra apps, it's a little surprising that Asus largely leaves the music/video side to the default Google apps. The Asus Gallery app will play video files, but it's hardly a fully-featured video player.
There are plenty of good music and video player apps to download for free from Google Play though, so this is no great failing.
Once again, the screen is the limiting factor for media. The Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M can only do justice to 720p video, as it doesn't have the pixels to render all the information a Full HD file contains.
Using Netflix, the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M only seems to receive the SD 480p stream, which is no great surprise when the tablet can't handle the 1080p one. While a well-encoded 720p video will look very good on the ZenPad, the step down to the low-definition stream with Netflix is very obvious.
We'd still take the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M over the entertainment system of just about any airline, but among tablets it's not great.
The speakers aren't class-leading either. Their position is good, sitting above the screen in a subtle cut-out. There's one driver at each end, getting you stereo sound when you hold the tablet in front of your face.
The speakers go respectably loud, and the upper mid-range punch stops them sounding entirely tinny, but the sound quality is still a little hard and unrefined. Amazon's Fire tablets, like the Amazon Fire HD 10, sound better.
Gaming is perhaps the entertainment most let down by the screen resolution, particularly as Android games don't tend to use advanced anti-aliasing, which smooths-out jagged edges. The exact titles that you might use to show off a tablet, like Asphalt 8 or Riptide GP, look a bit ropey despite having impressive graphics when played on a higher pixel density device.
The positive side-effect of using a low screen resolution is that games tend to run well despite the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M's low-end specs. You'll see some frame rate variance in titles that have advanced physics, but in our experience there's none of the game-ruining slow performance you see in some mobile devices where the processor is pushed beyond its limits by the screen resolution.
Specs and benchmark performance
- Solid specs for the price
- Weak pre-installed keyboard
Asus tablets often use slightly unconventional processors, as where an awful lot of mobile devices just use Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs, Asus has made significant use of both Intel and MediaTek chipsets.
The Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M has a MediaTek MT8163 CPU. This is a quad-core 1.3GHz processor with four Cortex-A53 cores. As such the chip is comparable with the Snapdragon 410 CPU that has been used in numerous low-end phones and tablets, including the recent Moto G4 Play.
In Geekbench 3 the Z300M scored 1943 points in multi-core tests (657 in single-core), while with Geekbench 4 it managed a multi-core score of 1804 and a single-core result of 654. This is much as we'd expect, similar to the scores of a Snapdragon 410 device, but just a little higher in most runs because the clock speed is 100MHz greater.
The slate uses a Mali MT720 MP2 graphics chip - a dual-core variant of one of Mali's third-generation Midgard units. This is not a remotely high-end setup from any perspective, but it is fast enough to do justice to a tablet with a low screen resolution like the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M.
The slate's CPU is paired with 2GB of DDR3 memory: not super-fast but enough of the stuff to make Android 6.0 function fairly well, and the 16GB of internal storage isn't too slow either, writing at 64MB/s and reading at 89MB/s.
You do notice this isn't a high-end tablet in use, but as Asus has matched the core specs to the rest of the hardware fairly well, it displays its lack of power in mostly inoffensive ways. Apps that aren't already loaded into the system RAM take a little longer to load than on a higher-end device, and occasionally when you head back to the home screens there will be a brief moment before the icons pop in.
At first it seems there's a bit of typing lag to the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M, a classic sign of questionable baseline performance, but it's actually just the keyboard 'click' sound effect not being properly synced to your key-presses.
This is down to the use of a custom Asus keyboard. We downloaded the standard Google keyboard and it got rid of the gnawing psychological nag of the laggy sounds. Of course, if you're going to use a tablet in public you should turn off any such tippy-tap noises anyway.
- Mediocre battery life
- Slow to charge
Low-resolution tablets like the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M often last absolutely ages between charges, like the otherwise-uninspiring LG G Pad 10.1. Asus says the Z300M lasts up to 11 hours, but in our battery test it didn't do quite that well.
Playing a 720p MP4 video on loop at maximum brightness takes 26% off the 18Wh battery, suggesting it'll last a little under six hours. The Asus ZenPad 8.0 in contrast lost just 16% of its battery in the same test – though that's a well above average result.
The Z300M's stamina will improve if you drop the screen brightness, with Asus's own figures based on brightness of 100 nits, but the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M is still not a super-long-lasting tablet. It's painfully slow to charge too, taking over four hours as there's no fast charging tech packed in.
Camera
- Basic camera
- Images often appear washed-out
Tablet cameras have improved a lot over the last couple of years. They're a step or two behind phone cameras, but higher-end models can take shots worth saving and even printing out. Cheap tablets like the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M sensibly keep their cameras basic, though.
There's a 5MP snapper on the back and a 2MP selfie camera on the front. They're the old kind of tablet camera, and you see this in the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M's image quality.
Transfer your pictures to a laptop or desktop and you can see all of a photo's meaningful detail without zooming in. There's no scope for cropping or using the ZenPad's in-camera digital zoom without your images looking ropey.
Fine detail in daylight images is flattened by a rather aggressive noise reduction algorithm and faulty white balance often leaves skies looking greenish.
While color appears fairly vibrant in well-lit shots, the relatively low-quality lens and sensor often struggle with any serious degree of light contrast in a scene, making the image appear washed-out.
There's around 0.5 seconds of shutter lag too, but this all adds up to a camera that's about as mediocre as we'd expect at the price. It's not a good camera, but it's probably the right one for the ZenPad 10 Z300M.
A lot of bonus modes are included, such as HDR, a GIF-maker, a shallow depth of field mode and a QR reader. However, with such limited image quality it's not worth expending too much energy on them. Unless you have a terrible phone, stick to using your handset's camera.
The front camera is similarly basic. Detail is low, and the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M struggles to compensate for strongly backlit scenes.
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
Click here to see the full resolution image
The Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M is a typical budget tablet. It's affordable, it has a 10.1-inch screen and specs that are good enough to ensure day-to-day performance is solid.
However, the slate treads water in the same way budget models have done for years, with a low-resolution display that appears pixelated from the sort of distances at which we normally use tablets.
Who's this for?
The ZenPad 10 Z300M is clearly designed for those on a tight budget, but who want a big screen and potentially also a keyboard, for maximum productivity.
But the slate tries to do too much for too little, and would have made more sense with a smaller screen or a sharper one - even if that meant the price went up a bit.
Should you buy it?
The Z300M plods along well enough, and offers better value than a rival Samsung slate, but this feels like a tablet designed for clueless high street shoppers.
Those in the know would do better to spend just a little more for much greater returns.
Competition
The ZenPad Z300M hasn't been released in a vacuum, and even at the low end of the market there are a number of alternatives available.
Asus ZenPad S 8.0
The Asus ZenPad S 8.0 has been around for a little while now, but is similar to the ZenPad 10 Z300M other than that it is an 8-inch tablet rather than a 10-incher, and that it has some much higher-end specs.
The ZenPad S 8.0's screen is the important improvement, with a 2048 x 1536 resolution providing the pin-sharp look the ZenPad 10 Z300M sorely lacks. If you want a tablet to devour video and read articles, the experience on the ZenPad S 8.0 is much glossier, and these days you can find it for a similar price if you shop around.
Apple iPad Mini 2
Apple's cheap iPad is another golden oldie. Again, it's smaller, and more expensive to boot, but doesn't feel low-end like the plastic ZenPad 10 Z300M.
If you don't mind buying a refurbished unit rather than a new tablet, you can bridge most of the cost gap between the two devices. Screen resolution on the iPad Mini 2 is much higher as well, with none of the obvious pixelation seen in the cheaper ZenPad model.
Samsung Galaxy Tab E
The Samsung alternative to the Asus ZenPad 10 Z300M is the Galaxy Tab E. They're similar in specs, the big difference is that while the ZenPad has a 10.1-inch screen, the Galaxy Tab E has a 9.6-inch display, designed to be held in portrait aspect rather than landscape.
Samsung's slate also has less storage (8GB) and a much weaker CPU, so there is a price to pay for that Samsung name, as usual. Both tablets suffer from the low screen resolution issue, but given how weak the Galaxy Tab E's CPU is, we'd consider the Asus a safer bet.
First reviewed: September 2016