VEIKK A50 Review

The VEIKK A50 is a nice looking tablet with a unique touchpad feature which is different from any other tablets I have seen before. Based on the written specifications, it is a tablet boasting performance similar to that of tablets like the Huion H1060P and XP-Pen Deco 03, but for the low price of ~60 USD.

I wish I could say this tablet is fantastic with its unique (and actually usable!) touchpad implementation, but unfortunately, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it. I will explain why in my review.

About VEIKK: They are a fairly new company which began selling tablets sometime near the end of 2017. According to what I have heard, they have taken in some of Ugee’s engineers, so they are not completely inexperienced when it comes to making tablets despite being a new company.
I currently do not list them in my Tablet Masterlists because they have not been around for very long, but if they stick around for a while more, gain more trust, and release great tablets, they may be added eventually.

This review is brought to you thanks to Gearbest who was kind enough to send me the VEIKK A50 for review. Many thanks to them for giving me this opportunity.
As usual, my reviews are written based on my honest thoughts and opinions, and I never agree to review a product if I am required to only say good things about it.
If you believe receiving a review product for free makes the review biased, now is a good time for you to stop reading.

Anyways, onto the review!

Please note!
-I am not a Mac or Linux user!! I only tested this tablet on Windows 10.
-Prices may have changed since I wrote this review.
-Check when a review was written. Some aspects may improve or change over time, so it is in your best interest to concentrate on reviews which are less than 1 year old.

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Table of Contents

• How good is this tablet?
• Important specifications
• What’s in the box?
• Tablet drivers
• The drawing experience!
• Conclusion
• Places to buy the tablet

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How good is this tablet?

Design and build quality: Quite good!
Tablet drivers: Fairly good.
Drawing experience: Acceptable.

Overall: A decent buy for 60 USD.

My verdict:
-This tablet is certainly capable enough to draw with, but there are unfortunately other tablets in the same price range which perform better, such as the XP-Pen Star 03 and GAOMON M106K.
If you feel like being different and supporting a new company, then perhaps the VEIKK A50 is up your alley. Otherwise, I would not recommend it when there are more capable tablets out there.

Gearbest gave me a promotion code to share, so if you’re interested in this tablet, make sure you use the code to save some money!
Get the VEIKK A50 for 49.99 USD from Gearbest using the code: GBVEIA50
Period of validity: Until Mar. 31, 2019
Gearbest: https://bit.ly/2B7QFzG

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Important specifications

Price: 61.74 USD (when this review was written)
Active Area: 10 x 6.25 inches
Pen Type: Battery-free
Pen Buttons: 2 side buttons, no eraser
Pen Pressure: 8192
Pen Tilt Sensitivity: No
Expresskeys: 8 buttons, 1 touch-pad
Multi-touch: No

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What’s in the box?

The tablet comes in a double-layered box with a glossy black outer cover and a much simpler white inner box.

The things that come in the box:

• VEIKK A50 tablet
• Battery-free pen
• Felt pen pouch
• Tablet cable (USB type-A to USB type-C)
• Pen nib replacements x8
• User manual
• “Thank you” card

The tablet has a simple design with the whole top surface being one flat piece of roughly textured plastic.

Despite being a very thin tablet, there is basically no flex when doing a simple twist test by gripping both ends of the tablet and twisting.

The surface of the tablet has quite a rough texture which is clearly an attempt to create a “paper-like” experience. They have done quite a good job with the texture as it was actually quite enjoyable to draw on this texture without it feeling too scratchy or coarse.

Much to my surprise, I can’t find any places where the texture has been worn out from my few days of testing, despite pressing fairly hard with the pen many times while colouring.
I have always noticed wear and tear on my other roughly textured tablets after just a day of drawing, but this tablet shows absolutely none. Good job with that part of the tablet, VEIKK.

The back of the tablet has a pretty unusual dotted pattern, but aside from that it has the usual rubber feet and information sticker. The rubber feet grip well and I had no problems with the tablet moving.

The edges of the tablet are all slightly rounded corners. I am not a fan of this design as these kinds of edges dig into my wrists despite being slightly rounded, and my wrists begin to hurt pretty quickly during my longer drawing sessions.
Personally, I would much prefer to have beveled edges to give your wrists a comfortable place to rest.

The shortcut buttons are pretty good in that they are fairly easy to click and aren’t too loud. However, they are not quite as good as other shortcut keys I have tried before, so they are only “average” in my opinion.
You can press multiple keys and have them all activate together. Ex. You have “Ctrl” on one key and “Z” on another. If you click them both, they will become “Ctrl+Z”. I believe this is called anti-ghosting.

On the other hand, the touchpad is a unique type of touchpad which is not like the typical touchpad you would find on a laptop. The VEIKK A50 touchpad only senses 5 different gestures which are: Up swipe, down swipe, left swipe, right swipe, and two-finger tap.
Each of these gestures can be manually assigned your own customizable functions in the drivers, allowing you to use the touchpad as multiple functions at once without having to switch between functions like you do with scroll wheels and touch bars.

For instance, if you assigned “zoom in/out” to up/down swipes, and “brush size up/down” to right/left swipes, and “reset view” to two-finger tap, now you have access to all 3 of these functions on the touchpad, all at once.
Whereas with those same functions on a scroll wheel or touch bar, you need a separate “switch function” button to switch between zoom in/out and brush size up/down.
This touchpad idea is a much better implementation of slider functions than scroll wheels and touch bars when it comes to efficiency.

Using the touchpad was also quite smooth and responsive and it didn’t behave unpredictably at all.
If the shortcut keys were the only important thing when judging a tablet, then this tablet would pass with flying colours.

The port on the tablet is a USB type-C port. This means that you can plug the L-shaped cable whichever way you want. If you are a left-handed user, you can flip the tablet around and plug in the cable the opposite way depending on where you want the cable to go.

The switch beside the port is a manual switch to control whether the touchpad is on or off. Weirdly enough, it’s a switch solely to control the touchpad and it doesn’t turn on/off the shortcut buttons.

The VEIKK A50 uses a battery-free pen with a full plastic body. The grip has a matte plastic, while the top part has an even rougher matte plastic. I think I would have preferred the rougher matte plastic on the grip instead of the top, but either way, the pen doesn’t really slip between your fingers.

Holding the pen feels pretty comfortable, and the bulge at the bottom of the grip helps keep your fingers from slipping past that point.

The buttons protrude from the surface of the pen and are very easy to find just by rolling the pen in your hand. They click nicely and feel decent to use, although the top button on my pen is really tough to press when pressed along the edge.

The top of the pen does not have anything.

Due to the rough texture on the tablet surface, this is how much the pen nib has worn down over the few days I have used the tablet, but this is what you should expect with a rough paper-like texture on your tablet.

You do get 8 replacement nibs with the tablet though, so they should last you quite a while.

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Tablet drivers

The tablet drivers are fairly easy to install. Although in this case, you will want to plug in the tablet before installing the drivers, otherwise the drivers may not register that the tablet is plugged in right away.
Also, make sure that you remove all previous tablet drivers completely if you have any of those installed.

Once you’ve installed the driver, the icon will show up in your system tray (the area beside the clock). The driver will also create a shortcut on your desktop for starting the driver software if you don’t see your driver running in the system tray.

Although the installer doesn’t prompt you to restart your computer after it finishes, I wholeheartedly suggest restarting your computer to allow Windows to properly upgrade the files necessary for the driver to run smoothly.

In the driver, you can configure your tablet expresskeys, pen buttons, pen pressure curve, and work area. There is no option to export profile backups, but it does give you the option to create specific settings which will run when you have a specific program open.

Personally, I think the lack of an option to export/import profile backups is a big deal as you will lose all the customs settings you made if you ever have to uninstall your drivers, or want to install them on a different device.

The Pen tab allows you to customize the pen buttons and the pen pressure curve.

The pen buttons can be assigned keyboard functions or mouse clicks, and a few other specialized functions, but you cannot assign multiple different types of functions to the same button. For example, you cannot assign keyboard keys and mouse clicks together.

The pen pressure curve is directly customizable with 3 points to adjust.

The Mapping tab allows you to customize which monitor your tablet is mapped to, the pen mode, and the work area.

The option for enabling or disabling Windows Ink is also in this tab.

One thing which is clearly lacking from this menu is a “force proportions” option. It seems that this tablet has a 16:9 ratio active area, which is usually the monitor ratio that people have nowadays, but for people who have older monitors or wide screen monitors, not having a “force proportions” option will be extremely annoying as they will have to input the work area manually.

Also, speaking of mapping, the mapping for this tablet did not work properly inside Clip Studio Paint until I went into File > Preferences > Tablet and checked the “Use mouse mode in setting of tablet driver” option. After checking that option, there were no problems.

The Function tab allows you to customize the functions which are assigned to the shortcut keys and the touchpad.

The customization options are the same as the pen buttons where it has all the functions I can think of, but you cannot combine different functions together on the same key.

The keyboard customization is a bit weird where you need to input Ctrl, Alt, and Shift using the “Add Special Key” button, while all the rest of the keyboard keys are detected by pressing them.
The “Clear” and “Delete” buttons are slightly different in that the “Clear” button completely clears the whole section, and the “Delete” button clears everything except for the special keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift).
All in all, it’s a bit confusing and could be made a bit easier to use.

The section along the top allows you to set up different settings for different programs which will automatically switch based on the program you have active at the moment.

One criticism I have about this page is that the shortcut key functions should have been organized in the same way as the function keys shown in the preview on the right. So instead of it going K1-K4 along the left, it should have them organized as the top 4 spots to reflect how they are organized on the tablet itself.
It just doesn’t make sense to organize them differently and make things more confusing for the user.

Another criticism is that there is no one-click option to disable all the shortcut keys. The physical switch on the side of the tablet only disables the touchpad, so I would have liked an option to disable all the shortcut keys as well.

The About Us tab allows you to check for driver updates and access the diagnostic tool.

I cannot confirm whether the updater works, and whether it deletes all settings when updating or keeps all settings, because there are no new driver updates yet.

The diagnostic tool checks a few basic things which could have gone wrong. It’s not really useful for helping the user figure out the issue. I think it would be better to contact VEIKK support directly if you are having issues with your tablet.

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The drawing experience!

This tablet gave me a decent drawing experience. Everything about the tablet hardware is quite impressive, and the drawing experience was quite fine except for the pen pressure which was lacking the lightest pressures, making the initial activation force quite high. This was quite annoying as I expect the pen to sense my light taps, but it often doesn’t.

I only truly test my tablets on Clip Studio Paint because that’s all I use. You should contact VEIKK support directly if you want to know if the tablet is compatible with the drawing program you use, but most major drawing programs should be compatible. Their customer support is also very kind so there’s no need to be afraid of contacting them directly.

You may have noticed from the testing page, but the slow diagonal lines were extremely… crappy. I am certainly not someone who draws slow enough strokes to have these jags appear in my lines, but frankly, this amount of jaggedness is unacceptable for a device which is meant to translate pen motions cleanly to a computer.

The picture above is me using the exact same pen in Clip Studio Paint to try and get the thinnest and thickest lines I can. As you can see, I couldn’t consistently draw thin lines on the VEIKK A50, whereas with the Huion H1060P I could easily draw super thin lines.

The stroke control of the VEIKK A50 was decent, except that it was lacking quite a bit in the lightest pressures. This was fairly annoying because it wouldn’t sense my light taps when I double clicked, dragged the canvas, etc.
It also made it a bit of a chore to draw since I am very used to drawing lightly when I am sketching.

Another thing I have noticed about this tablet is that the pen pressure does not taper perfectly. The above image shows the areas which are not tapering smoothly when doing quick blotches+releases (so pressing hard, then flicking to the side quickly).
However, this is a problem which only occurs sometimes, and not all the time. It is an issue which does not appear when doing longer tapers because you wouldn’t be able to see these “bumps” in a long line.

Aside from the very high initial activation force, the pen pressure worked quite well, and I was actually able to finish a drawing with it. The tablet surface was also quite nice to work on due to its paper-like texture.

The shortcut keys and touchpad were also quite good, and I could certainly use them as they are without feeling like my work is getting impeded by them. I have always considered 12 shortcut keys to be the minimum for me to avoid using my keyboard, so the 8 shortcut keys + touchpad (3 functions total) are just enough for me to work with.

Unfortunately, I found the touchpad a bit too large and it made it uncomfortable for me to use the shortcut keys with my thumb and index finger reaching around it. It can certainly work, but the 12 shortcut keys on my Huion H1060P were placed closer together which made them much more comfortable to use (plus the shortcut keys on the Huion H1060P are simply nicer).

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Conclusion

Overall, there are a few too many issues with the drawing capabilities of the VEIKK A50 for me to recommend it. Even with the good build quality, unique touchpad, and decent shortcut keys, the jagged slow lines and high initial activation force make the VEIKK A50 a rather unappealing tablet in my eyes.

If you’re feeling rebellious and want a lesser known brand, then the VEIKK A50 can certainly be a decent choice. Otherwise, I really don’t recommend it over similarly priced but better tablets like the XP-Pen Star 03 or GAOMON M106K.

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Places to buy the tablet

Gearbest gave me a promotion code to share, so if you’re interested in this tablet, make sure you use the code to save some money!
Get the VEIKK A50 for 49.99 USD from Gearbest using the code: GBVEIA50
Period of validity: Until Mar. 31, 2019
Gearbest: https://bit.ly/2B7QFzG

If you have any questions about the tablet, feel free to ask me!