TP-Link Touch P5 Review : WiFi Router With Touchscreen!

Say hello to Touch P5 from TP-Link. Routers have traditionally shared the same design philosophy - a black box with one or more antennae; and that's kind of 'boring'. Design engineers at TP-Link decided to make the routers beautiful and not only embossed a design on the body of Touch P5, but also added a pretty looking touchscreen display. A powerful wireless router with a touchscreen display is surely pretty gadget to look at, but can it make it to your shopping list? I decided to find out through my review.

What you will like:

• Overall a very good, powerful router on the market for your home or small office
• Too pretty for a wireless router
• Touchscreen right on the body of router makes it tad easy to configure it
• Decent signal throw
• Use it as router, access point or as a range extender (repeater)
• The display doubles up as a clock; if you want.

What you may not like:

• Good, but not exceptional or record breaking, practical data transfer
• AC3200 and even AC5300 routers are already around.
• Even kids can set it up. So you can't boast your technical skills in front of colleagues or family members.
• The body is bit 'plasticky', don't even think of dropping it.

The selection of router typically should begin with the kind of use you wish to put it to. For a regular home or small office setup; this router has everything you can ask for including parental controls. It's got dual bands - 2.4 GHz and 5GHz; which should should sail your wireless signals even if everyone in the society has their own wireless network. Let's begin our review by looking at what's in the box -

Unboxing the TP-Link Touch P5 Wireless Router


The Touch P5 comes with the main router unit, a set of three antenna, patch cord and the wireless adapter. You will also get quick reference manual and product specification booklet; which you are likely to ignore. For the regular buyers, the first thing to look at is the pretty body with the touchscreen but for a true geek like you; the obvious thing to look at is the 'back' of the router.


Notice and appreciate the USB 2.0 and gorgeous ethernet ports. If USB 2.0 looks dated, TP-Link's got a separate USB 3.0 port as well and thankfully, it's more accessible. The entire body is properly ventilated and I never had the router warm up above unacceptable levels during my tests. Did you notice the absence of the WPS button? It's been removed for a good reason (hint: it's now an icon on the display).


The Touch P5 has got lot of quality electronics inside, which you can read about here: #-Link-Snipped-#. But the most noteworthy items on the list are -

• Capacitive touchscreen display, 4.3" in size
• Wireless support: IEEE 802.11ac/n/a 5GHz | IEEE 802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz + 256QAM
• Four 10/100/1000Mbps LAN Ports and One 1 10/100/1000Mbps WAN Port
• Broadcom CPUs with cores clocked at 1 GHz, 256 MB RAM.
• Touchscreen graphics handled by single M4 core processor at 180 MHz : Good Thing!

Is the Touchscreen Useful?

The answer is 'Yes'. It's definitely the easiest routers I've ever configured. In fact, you don't need to configure this at all. Just follow the instructions on the touch-screen and you'll be good to go. The touchscreen is definitely intuitive to use. The touchscreen is fairly responsive and does the job very well it's supposed to do. You should of course not compare its responsiveness with that of your smartphone. Touch P5's touchscreen isn't meant to be operated 40 times a day.



Entering information with the on-screen keyboard is easy. I could enter the password for CrazyEngineers wireless network; which is quite complicated, in just one go. Once you are through the setup, you will see iOS like icons, a wallpaper on the display and some useful information like status of your connection.

The software provides almost every function you'll need on the touchscreen itself - right from adjusting your wireless settings, setting up guest networks, sharing your printers to resetting the router and setting up the device admin password. The touchscreen gets the job done.


Testing The Router Performance:

The network setup in our office is very simple - we've got the latest mac machines sharing the same Internet connection. For the sake of practical use of the router, we decided to try multiple tests to check wireless range, speed of file transfer and streaming. Here are the observations we made.

Note: All the tests were done on devices capable of using 802.11ac.

In the range checking test, we simply tried to stream YouTube full HD video on Samsung S6 Edge.:-

1. The video loaded just fine at about 20 meters when the phone and router were directly in line with no obstacles.
2. The signal strength dropped a bit with one concrete wall in between; but video playback was smooth, without buffering.
3. With about 20 meters of distance and about 3 concrete walls in between, YouTube automatically switched to 480p and there was buffer.

Compared to our existing ASUS RT-66U AC1750 router, the range of Touch P5 is definitely better; but not just as good as we'd loved it to be. The results were no different with the file transfers. For the sake of practical situations, we tried airdrop and file transfer from Android to iMac using Airdroid.

At a distance of about 20 meters, without any obstacle in between, the router could make connections at about 7-8 MBps on 2.4 GHz band; which we think is very impressive. At 5 GHz the router did about 15-18 MBps and about 19-21 MBps as we moved closer by half the earlier distance. Note that the 5 GHz performance was not the best in the market; but it should get all the job done. You will certainly not feel that it's slow unless you are doing some heavy duty video streaming from your home media server.

With about 10 meters distance between the client and the router and one wall in between, we got varying speeds of about 2 - 6 MBps (on 2.4 and 5GHz bands) ; which is good but again, not impressive.

Final Thoughts:

The TP-Link Touch P5 is an impressive router for your home or office; if you are looking for a decent performer. The touchscreen is definitely a nice addition to the router; but it fails to impress as its USP. Router setup isn't very complicated even if you are doing it from your desktop and Touch P5 makes it even more simpler. Make no mistake. This router is at par with its competition if not a step ahead! It does everything you want it to do. It will fill all the rooms with Wireless signals if you live in a 3-4 BHK apartment and install the router in a central location. It will stream all the videos, games and music effortlessly.