I can't believe she's finally dead.
Yep. Guess I'll need a new one then, but my budget for a tablet is only $300, I'd like to spend
less if I can. Don't worry mom, I'm here for you.
Thank you.
And it's a good thing I am because the budget tablet market is a veritable jungle, full
of predators. There's scummy manufacturers selling last decade's tech at this decade's pricing.
There's devices loaded up with adware and spyware masquerading as deals.
And sure, iPads are really great, but sadly iPads aren't $300.
Or are they? We scoured the bargain bins to find the best deals, and we've come up with five tablets
that won't waste your money or your time.
And we found some big surprises. For one thing, Budget Tablet Kingpin Amazon is nowhere on our list this time around.
And for another, there's the surprise segue to our sponsor.
Let's kick things off with our sub $100 contender, Walmart's O&N 10.1 inch tablet.
The last time we looked at a Walmart tablet, we called it the eWaste Special.
They've upgraded their creaky plastic and plastic build with metal and glass.
It not only feels significantly more premium than their older tablet, it even feels, I'd
say, as good as Samsung's entrance in this roundup, which is twice as expensive.
But while the build quality is excellent for the price point, the screen resolution is
just $1280x800, which is pretty low for this size.
It also isn't very bright, and it's not that pretty.
Wait, where did you guys get my grade 4 report card?
Making matters worse, the O&N has only 3 gigs of RAM, which slows down multitasking to the
point where even updating apps in the background can render this tablet sluggish for minutes
at a time. The O&N also lacks a headphone jack, though it does come with a slot for expandable storage,
which you'll probably want to use because this thing only comes with 32 gigs of storage,
10 of which are consumed by a surprisingly bloat-free Android 14-based operating system.
That is a refreshing chain from the ad-ridden experience of most inexpensive tablets, which
is probably the biggest argument for this thing. For all of its flaws, it's just $98.
So at the very least, we have got to give Walmart a most improved award, even if it
doesn't score an outright recommendation. If you know that your workload will be light and your eyes aren't too judgmental, or you
want something that you can throw in the backseat to shut the kids up on a road trip, then this
could be a perfect solution. Just be aware that Walmart doesn't seem to offer any promise of future software updates.
And the same goes for our next pick, the AldoCube iPlay 50 Pro Mini.
We decided to look at this one after seeing a surprising amount of enthusiasm for it on
Reddit, and you know what? It is pretty slick, at least on paper.
Basically, every aspect of it is significantly improved over our $100 tablet, making it better
at multitasking, gaming, well, everything.
However, while the internals might wow, the performance improvement really is very noticeable
here, the externals are a little less impressive.
The construction, while metal, lacks refinement, with parts that aren't flush, even the screen
we actually measured is a little off-center. There's no biometrics of any kind, even if that is true of most budget tablets.
And the single speaker is truly awful.
Thankfully, though, you can at least plug some headphones in with the 3.5mm jack.
And there are other things to like. It comes with a combo SD and SIM card slot, and the screen, while off-center, isn't half
bad and includes a screen protector.
It does suffer a fair bit when viewed off-axis, but its higher density than our last tablet
making it much better for reading and watching and is a huge upgrade overall over the ONN.
That is, assuming you care about more than just raw size.
Like many unknown budget brands, I wouldn't expect much by the way of customer support,
device updates, or accessories. We're running Android 13 with a year old security patch, which is a yikes.
But that's kind of par for the course, and we were very pleased to find that unlike other
budget tablets, we had no issues with Widevine support.
What's Widevine, you ask? It's a form of digital rights management that's used by most major streaming services.
It's what makes it so that when you try to screen record Netflix, it shows up black.
Anyway, the part that matters is that we were only considering devices with Widevine level
1. That's the level that will allow you to stream in HD rather than being stuck at 480p on Netflix.
Moving on, if software support matters more than best hardware for your buck, you might
want to take a look at our next contender. Now, I'm going to be real with you guys.
Samsung's tablet lineup is large and confusing, ranging from excellent and expensive to complete
dog s***, and they seem to go out of their way to make it darn near impossible to figure
out which is which. For example, there's the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite, and you might think, hmm, okay, that must
be a tablet version of the Galaxy S6 phone that came out over 9 years ago.
But you'd be wrong. The S6 Tab actually came out 4 years after the S6 phone, then a year after that it was
cut down a little bit to become the Tab S6 Lite.
But the story is hardly over. That tablet was refreshed as the Tab S6 Lite 2 years after that, and then it got refreshed
again this year and is still called the Tab S6 Lite.
But enough about that. It's the A9 Plus that we're looking at today, specifically the 8GB RAM version, which we
chose in hopes of getting a better multitasking experience.
Like the competitors we've seen so far, the A9 Plus has a metal construction, but unlike
those, it's lighter weight, which is kind of refreshing, a refreshing feeling that fades
once you start using the thing. See, in spite of its name brand Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, it performs no better than the
AldoCube and even manages to chug when just swiping between pages on the home screen.
I think this has got to be a software issue. I mean, it has a high refresh rate 90Hz display that looks butter smooth when you're doing
other things. But now that we're spending over $200, I don't really care whether it's the hardware
or the software. I'm a lot less willing to make excuses for any kinds of issues.
Maybe it's the infamous Samsung bloat? I mean, even if we exclude the 16 Superfluous Samsung apps, we got six random apps from
third parties that were preloaded on this thing. Look, Samsung, I invited you into my home.
I didn't say that you could bring all your friends. Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty decent tablet once you remove that crap.
I mean, the display is kind of ghosty, but I would describe it as adequately sufficient.
The lightweight build really is easier to hold for an extended period than our cheaper
devices and the cameras are the best we've seen yet.
Same goes for the speakers.
It includes microSD expansion and it's even slated to get four years of software updates.
However, it's still clear that Samsung has cut some corners in order to hit this price
point. There's no real biometric authentication, no in-screen digitizer for S Pen stylus support,
no support for decks with a monitor thanks to the USB 2 charging port, and it also has
no headphone jack. Also, like our other budget options today, it supports only Wi-Fi 5.
But if you can get over the Samsung isms, you've got a pretty well-priced tablet that
will satisfy pretty much anyone who's using the device for primarily content consumption,
and you also get a robust accessory collection that could even help you get a little bit
of work done. Speaking of work done, check out the BBL on this Lenovo.
Like, damn girl, she's a thick boy.
With a large 11.5-inch display, eight speakers, and a built-in kickstand.
The Lenovo Tab Plus is positioned as a media consumption monster, and I gotta say, it kind
of delivers. The screen, while not the brightest, has great contrast and handles motion well, not to mention,
gives plenty of room to multitask, and the speakers, wow, do they ever get loud, and
not just loud, they're even good.
They're probably the best ones in our roundup, which, spoiler alert, does include an iPad.
Let's put a pin in that for now though, lttstore.com, and come back to the Tab Plus.
The all-metal housing contributes to a very premium feel, but also results in a heavy
tablet that can be a bit unwieldy to single hand.
The integrated kickstand does help with this a lot, because you can just put it down, and
OK, this is really cool. It opens up all the way to nearly 180 degrees, allowing for a nice drawing or note-taking
angle with the sold separately stylus. It also comes with ample onboard storage, and RAM, and expandable storage too, and with
their media focus, they also included a headphone jack.
But you knew there was going to be a but. The processor, which it shares with the much cheaper AldoCube, is a bit of a downer, especially
because of the way that it holds back an otherwise well-rounded desktop mode.
My biggest issue though, is not the processor, it's the bloatware.
Lenovo aggressively tries to trick you into installing unneeded games and apps while you're
setting up the device, and even if you cleverly navigate their dark pattern obstacle course,
you will still find that the device has automatically dumped a bunch of garbage on your home screen.
I'm talking 17 additional apps, plus an apps-for-you folder on the home screen where you can download
even more apps that you never asked for. It's confusing, and honestly disrespectful.
But with that said, the worst offenders can be easily removed, and Lenovo is promising
two Android version updates and four years of security updates, a pretty compelling value
proposition at the usual street price of under $300 and sometimes as low as $250.
Let's just hope they don't use those updates to cram even more ads into the user experience.
Now, it's time for the big surprise. At the top of our price range, we've got the iPad 10th Gen, which, unlike last time,
is brand new rather than recertified and is also, get this, pretty good.
It's not without flaws, I mean, let he who has never removed a headphone jack throw the
first stone. It's got stupid Apple Pencil support, a stupid Folio keyboard, stupid slow USB 2 speeds,
and a stupid lack of expandable storage.
But now that the cost of entry has dropped to $300, even below that in some recent sales,
a lot can be forgiven, making the iPad maybe the easiest recommendation on the whole list.
I mean, sure, the SoC in here is four years old, but unlike the rest of them, at least
at some point it was a flagship tier SoC, which makes it more than enough for all but
the most hardcore of tablet computing, and there's the screen.
It's still an LCD, but it is a darn fine LCD.
It's a nice LCD panel. And while Apple doesn't provide details on product support for the iPad, they have an
excellent track record of OS and security updates, with most iPads getting anywhere from six
years or more of full OS upgrade support.
And thanks to Apple's battery replacement service, there's a solid chance that you
will actually get that kind of lifespan out of the hardware.
On the subject of battery life, while no tablet here struggled with every one of them
managing what I would consider to be all-day battery life, the Walmart tablet surprisingly
beat everyone else by a decent margin in our tests.
Speaking of margins, if you're in the market for a cheap tablet, now is probably a pretty
good time to pull the trigger, at least if you're an American.
There is a strong possibility that tariffs are coming and you the consumer will be the
one paying the price. One study showed that overseas produced tablets, so all of them, could go up in price by $200
on average. I don't know that this will actually happen, and I doubt that it would hit this price point
quite that hard, but what I'm getting at is cheap tablets might not be getting cheaper,
so if you need one, now might be a good time. The question is, which one?
For the money, the O&N tablet is pretty hard to beat.
For the money. Then, my next best contenders have got to be the Tab Plus and the iPad 10th Gen, whichever
one you can get for cheaper. If you're tech savvy, I do think the AldoCube iPlay 50 Mini Pro offers phenomenal value
for what it is, but it's not the kind of thing that I would recommend for a normie
relative like these ones are. And on the subject of being tech savvy, this is by no means an exhaustive list.
The budget sector is a fickle beast with sales and price drops, part swaps and more, so let
us know in the comments what options you tech savvy folks recommend, and in return, I'll
let you know about our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out our Holiday PC Buyer's Guide.
It's got a build for every budget for the gamer on your list.