Blackview has built a reputation for being one of the best producers of rugged phones and budget tablets on the market, offering high performance and crazy high-end features for affordable prices, and this time they did it again with the new tablet Blackview Tab 16.
So if you are looking for a tablet at a budget price, the Tab 16 should be one of the good options, equipped with a bigger 11-inch FHD+ screen coupled with Widevine L1 support designed for 1080p video enjoyment on Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix. Besides, has big battery upgrades and storage expansion by offering a 7680mAh battery and 8GB RAM and can reach up to 14GB with 6GB of virtual RAM. Features that could boost its versatility include 256GB ROM, Doke OS_P 3.0 Based on Android 12, and PC Mode. All of this and more I will talk about it in this review, so without wasting time let’s move on to the article.
Blackview Tab 16 Features
- Ultra-slim Body & Premium Design
- Keyboard and Stylus Support
- Doke 3.0 system Based on Android 12
- Unisoc T616 Octa-Core SoC
- 8GB+Up to 6GB Extended + 256GB ROM
- 13MP Rear Camera, 8MP Front Camera
- 11″ FHD+ Display, Widevine L1 Support
- TÜV Rheinland Certification More Eye Comfortable
- 7680mAh Battery, 18W Quick Charger
- Smart-K Quad-box Speakers
- Dual 4G Network, GPS, PC Mode
Design And Build Quality
At first acquaintance, the Blackview Tab 16 makes a good impression and has got a rendition of the budget tablet design. It looks more expensive than it really is. While it is barely premium when it comes to its appearance, the Tab 16 managed to put together a stylish look without cranking up its price. It has a practical design with an interesting texture that fits comfortably in the hand and does not try to slip out, and the finish is extremely thorough. All of the parts have been superbly put together. As a result, the tablet appears tough. All the elements fit perfectly, the materials feel reliable, and everything is fine in this regard. Despite its aluminum frame, it feels super solid when you hold it in your hands. The edges, ports, buttons, and all the other exterior components have a precise finish, which further boosts the feel-good factor.
The Tab 16 features an aluminum body on the back with a length of 260.11mm and a width of 164.71mm with a frame that gives a kind thickness of 7.95mm a wonderful feeling when held in your hand, despite its weight of 533g. If you ask me about the quality of the manufacturing, there is nothing to complain about it, because Blackview is always working to provide high-quality products to users all over the world at affordable prices. So, The design and build of this tablet are very satisfying.
On The Front
The design of the Tab 16 is beautiful with some touches that make it look more eye-catching and more premium. In front of the device, you have a full screen of 11 inches that takes 80% of the body. The bezels around the screen are neat but with prominent edges. The notch for the front camera is classic with an 8MP sensor on the middle of the top for taking selfies and video chats, which we will talk more about soon. What kind of glass is used here is unspecified.
On The Back
On the backside, you have a flat and clean panel from metal with a premier look and came in three colors, Gray, Blue, and Green, what catches your attention is the camera setup and a flashlight, with a rather bump that literally rises a millimeter above the body, and an embossed Blackview logo at the middle.
Ports And Buttons
On the right side are the power button and the volume up / down buttons and a Type-C charging port. on the top side, we find the dual SIM slot that holds two nano-SIM cards or a single nano-SIM card with a MicroSD card, Last but not least, at the bottom and top, has a dual speakers on on each side.
Fingerprint
Through all this, it is clear that there is no fingerprint reader, which is what bothers me the most here because for me and for many users it makes unlocking the screen a lot easier. Fortunately, Tab 16 supports face unlock, which is not as secure as a fingerprint, or even effective in all circumstances, but it does exist.
Detachable Keyboard & Stylus
The multi-functional Blackview Tab 16 tablet is designed for on-the-go business, learning, and entertainment, featuring a full-size wireless detachable keyboard and a dynamically adjustable multi-angle display. The full keyboard can also be attached directly to the tablet via a Bluetooth connector. The stylus is instantly responsive to every stroke on the screen, allowing you to sketch and scribble to your heart’s content.
Blackview Tab 16 – Display Quality
Now, let’s move on to why I fell in love with this tablet. The display on the Blackview Tab 16 is one of the best that you get with almost every other budget tablet nowadays, with an 11-inch IPS FHD+ resolution bigger than the 10.51-inch display of its predecessor, with up to 5% wilder view enjoyment, and 16.7 Million colors, 300 Nits Brightness, and 224 PPI. And has a 60Hz refresh rate with a high resolution of 1200×2000, so you can enjoy any content on the tablet with good color accuracy and brightness, The bezels around the screen are thin to deliver a better experience with an 80% Screen Body Ratio.
The first thing that caught my eye was the colors on this display, which look more vibrant than you’d expect from a low-cost tablet. Even the black levels are pretty good for the price, and that very well explains why the screen has a good contrast ratio and vibrant colors, and the content on the screen doesn’t look very sharp. But that’s what you get for the price.
While on a sunny day, the screen does not fade and remains readable, Of course, this does not apply to direct sunlight. This type of screen is the best you can get on a budget tablet and provides good color reproduction with no picture distortion and blue light protection for comfortable reading. Yes, this screen is not better than an AMOLED screen, but it remains better than other LCD screens and is suitable for this price range. In short, It has by far the best display I’ve seen in a budget tablet, and I find it perfectly adequate for web browsing and content consumption., you will get the best value for what you pay, a large and high-quality screen suitable for media consumption, whether you are watching the video, playing games or browsing the social media.
TÜV Rheinland
Blackview has made this screen eye-friendly by TÜV Rheinland Low Blue Light Certified. Working in tandem with three customized screen modes, namely the Dark mode, Sleep Mode, and Eye Comfort mode, the Tab 16 screen significantly reduces the exposure to blue light, ensuring better eye protection and lowering the risk of eye strain after viewing the screen in a dark environment for a long time.
Blackview Tab 16 – Cameras Setup
Rear Camera
So far, the overall rating of the Blackview Tab 16 tablet is more than great, but this does not mean that it’s ideal, especially when we are talking about a low-cost tablet, The Tab 16 has a single rear camera with a Sonyy® IMX258 13MP sensor with LED flash. That is typically what you get with any affordable tablet nowadays and maybe not be capable of capturing the details, colors, or ranges to produce high-quality images. So, you should not expect too much in terms of photo quality.
In spite of very basic camera hardware, the Tab 16 manages to capture pictures with decent image quality, at least in daylight. The images look bright, vibrant, and quite detailed for the price. But, Low-light environments bring out the limitations of this camera. Although the pictures look bright, they have a really bad dynamic range and lots of noise. The level of detail is also low, which makes the image look soft and unimpressive. Suffice it to say, if you are expecting better camera performance then perhaps you should consider spending a bit more.
Video Recording
The Blackview Tab 16 can record videos up to 1080p resolution at 30fps. Although that looks good on paper for a tablet of this price tag. The quality of the videos is really bad, the amount of detail in 1080p videos is so low and without stabilization. The videos also come out very shaky and have poor colors and dynamic range and this is not a big difference from other tablets.
Front Camera
Thankfully, the Blackview Tab 16 adopted a Samsung® S5K4H7 8MP front camera that was in the acceptable range provided there is a lot of light. Selfies taken with the tablet look bright and have a healthy amount of detail. The colors look slightly washed out, but that’s something that other similarly-priced tablets also suffer from. So, Tab 16 gets a pass here, the images taken with the front camera in daylight are certainly social media worthy.
But, selfies captured in low light have significantly fewer details and contain a lot of noise. But you have to keep in mind that other similarly-priced tablets also suffer from those issues. Fortunately, the images at least look bright and have good color reproduction.
Blackview Tab 16 – Overall Performance
Performance is sort of the main focal point for the Blackview Tab 16, is quite nimble and perfectly copes with daily tasks – messengers, mail, web surfing, social networks, videos, etc. As for games, given the characteristics, you should not expect anything spectacular.
Under the hood of the Blackview Tab 16 is the entry-level Unisoc Tiger T616 chipset which offers eight cores – two at 2GHz and six at 1.8GHz. This is far from the most impressive chip, made using a dated 12 nm production process. If you know much about mobile tech, the name Unisoc will likely evoke thoughts of sluggish and stuttering phones; but we didn’t find the Tab 16 to be too bad. In performance terms, however, it’s far better than its MediaTek Helio G37 or the Unisoc Tiger T606.
The tablet was fairly quick to navigate, both for simple tasks such as scrolling between menus and when using social media apps and checking emails. Sure, that’s “budget tablet quick”, as opposed to “premium tablets quick” – but the Blackview neither crashed nor felt too slow to use. This isn’t a phone for gamers. However, top-end games will struggle to run on this phone, You’ll have to dial down graphic settings for the intense games but light to moderate games will fair really well. so don’t expect to boot up PUBG Mobile, ramp up the graphics to Ultra mode and expect to have a good time. If your gaming habits mainly involve Angry Birds, Candy Crush, and Pokémon Go, though, you’ll be fine.
Most of the applications ran very quickly because Blackview Tab 16 comes with 8GB LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB eMMC 5.1 storage, and if that is not enough can be expanded the storage via a microSD card up to 1TB, and even RAM can be expanded up to 6GB RAM expansion from 8GB to 14GB without extra cost by memory expansion technology, which can be expanded with a virtual RAM expansion feature where part of the storage on the phone is designated to function as part of the random access memory process. According to our observations, this will not necessarily improve the phone’s gaming performance, but will instead allow for more background app running or switching between apps. This is useful if users are streaming or recording their gaming, as multiple apps are involved, this feature is shared by several Chinese brands, including Realme and Vivo, in addition to Xiaomi.
With the Unisoc T616 as SoC, Blackview makes a solid choice for the Tab 16, which means a clear performance plus compared to the previous tablets. The tablet is much more agile in everyday use and does not immediately drop to its knees during a somewhat more complex background app. Photos sometimes load quite quickly on websites, so browsing with the Blackview Tab 16 can also be quite nice.
Benchmark Blackview Tab 16
In numbers, Blackview Tab 16 achieved about 268,000 on the Antutu benchmark, and this tells you about the hardware performance of this tablet. However, games should not be the main reason for purchasing this tablet. Generally, the performance is more than impressive and maybe the best in this category. so it easily outperforms most tablets in its price category such as the Alldocube iPlay 40 Pro or Alldocube iPlay 50 or even Blackview Tab 15.
Playing Content
Playing the content on YouTube, was very smooth. You can play videos at a maximum of 1080p at 30FPS without any problems or lag, and up to 2K at best with some slight stutter. And one of the main points of the Blackview Tab 16 tablet has Google Widevine DRM L1, so with paid services like Netflix and Amazon Prime you can view 1080p High-quality cinema-level video and film, and this level maybe not be found on all budget Chinese tablets except for some models.
Sound Quality
Blackview also did an excellent job with the speakers. In terms of audio capabilities, the tablet punches above its weight with dual loudspeakers onboard. The sound is great for watching movies or listening to music, with rich and detailed sound. Thanks to the dual box speakers, Blackview Tab 16 brings ultimate enjoyment of a sense of technology so that you can enjoy the epic theater-level movie at home with ease. The clear sound produced by the Smart-K Quad-BOX speakers without distortion whips you into extreme excitement and thrill when gaming, listening to grand symphonies, and watching movies.
Doke 3.0 system Based on Android 12
Blackview Tab 16 is shipped with the Android 12.0 version, bringing new features like chat bubbles, conversation-prioritizing, screen recording, one-time permission, privacy dashboard, split screen mode, and some interesting customization additions with UI that has better gesture navigation controls, a dark theme, and contains most of the features that come with the system, the most important of which is the presence of all Google services, Making the tablet experience smoother and more personalized.
Doke OS_P 3.0 system based on Android 12 renders its extreme fluency experience and elegant UI interface that amuse you and saves you time and it is well appraised by users. This operating system is the fruit of the persistent effort of the Blackview software team to design a more customized and fluent OS for a more intelligent user experience. For example, Doke OS_P 3.0 comes with a bunch of self-developed apps such as Cold Room, and System Manager.
And for office workers and students, the good news is that Tab 16 will be loaded with the WPS office set that will allow users to open Word files, excel sheets, and powerpoints all in one app, improving the running efficiency of the OS.
PC Mode
The tablet also features a PC mode, which is found on other tablets manufactured by Huawei and Xiaomi. So Blackview Tab 16 will become a portable notebook in seconds on the PC mode combined with a keyboard + OTG mouse connection, working smarter and easier as if you were on a computer, instantly liberating productivity. At the same time, it acts as a mini PC or small-size laptop with a responsive touching screen, speeding up your productivity as soon as possible. With its practical PC mode, there is no doubt that you can enjoy great convenience in editing business documents, taking class notes, and having online conferences.
Connectivity & Call Quality
Connectivity options for this tablet include a high-speed Wi-Fi network that supports 2.4GHz / 5GHz AC power that works well and provides your maximum internet speed, Meanwhile, this tablet supports GPS + GLONASS+Galileo+BeiDou the top 4 satellite navigation systems, and A-GPS internet assisted positioning, not the best but it works. Also, has Bluetooth 5.0 and 4G LTE multi-band to offer good signal quality and coverage for making phone calls and accessing the Internet easily.
Blackview Tab 16 Battery And Charging
Budget tablets nowadays offer a great battery life. The Blackview Tab 16 has a large 7680mAh battery pack as well as a display and a processor that consumes very less power. Yes, the processor is not as efficient as that of its rivals, but it certainly consumes less energy than mid-range or high-end SoCs, owing to its low clock speeds.
This is very nice for an inexpensive device and goes around 7 to 9 hours of screen-on time without any worries of continuous use for surfing the Internet, Google, YouTube, and following social media, of course, the time is less when playing games. And with moderate use, it will stay with you for a whole day on one charge it mostly takes about 2 hours to fully charge using Type-C with 18W charging speeds. However, I can say that the battery was satisfying.
For a regular user, the battery will easily last for a whole working day, depending on your usage such as the times you open the screen, and the type of applications you run, also it suffices for more than 15h consecutive of watching videos. however, its performance was good and this is mostly because it is equipped with stock Android 12 and doesn’t have many pre-installed programs, even the interface is simple without any complications or processes in the background and this is what limits battery drain.
Final verdict
Blackview Tab 16 is a good tablet that has the potential to beat its competitors in the price range it belongs to and is considered a mid-range tablet, I think is one of the best budget tablets in 2022, with a good processor, abundant memory of 256GB, 8GB RAM, support fast charging 18W and an FHD+ screen and the most important feature is Widevine L1 support that allows you to watch streaming services in high quality. but that does not make it flawless as it lacks a fingerprint reader and has acceptable camera quality. however it gives you powerful performance at a low price, so if you are looking for a tablet at this time, you will not get anything better than Tab 16 in this price range.
Blackview Tab 16 Price & Availability
Usually, better performance means a higher price, but not in the case of Blackview Tab 16. The tablet is now only priced at $190 on Aliexpress. So, don’t miss the chance to snatch up at one, And to view its price or buy it, you can access the offer by clicking on the store icon.
What’s in the Box?
- Blackview Tab 16 Tablet
- Type-C Cable
- Power Adapter
- SIM Tray Ejector
- Manual
- Tablet Case
- Capacitive stylus