Anyone know anything about 10" android tablets?

[digitalwanderer]

Hey, hi, hello, and howdy! Sorry I haven't been around, life's been busy as hell and then my neighbor gave me a german shepard puppy a few months ago that turned everything upside down...but I need help so of course here I am.

A friend of mine is asking my advice about a good/cheap 10" android tablet so they have something they can read off of easier. They were going to get the Fire10, but then I had to go and notice it doesn't run android. They've been sending me links to tablets running in the $120-180 range but they all look like shit to me! One was bragging about how it had 1GB and ran Marshmallow and the other one was the cheap one...

There was a power outage last night here and unfortunately I got hit by a real bad shut down on Bubbles and was up until 5 this morning just getting her to recognize her boot drive again. Got her limping enough to get my windows images/tools off her and make a good boot USB on my wife's PC, but Bubbles mobo is so slow that I don't even think it has USB 2.0 anymore and I've been watching windows install for over an hour now while guarding my open case from a rather large almost 9 month old puppy. :/

So if anyone knows anything about tablets or at least can recommend me any pointers I"d be most grateful. I suck just using phones since my fingers are too big and not sensitive enough anymore so I'm not that great with Android, that's my daughter's dept now and area of expertise and I gladly will defer to her opinion, but it's her kitty Sophia's first birthday so she's celebrating with the cats and I don't want to ask her to geek for me.

Big love, missed y'all like air! I do not feel right when I don't hit the forum regular, it just seems wrong!

 

[Babel-17]

I still have my 7" HTC Flyer. It's from 2011, and still works though I did replace the (not meant to be replaced) battery. Came with Gingerbread, and got updated to Honeycomb. It ran with HTC Sense on top of that, and it showed how you can have a smooth experience by not gacking up the default Android experience with a vendor's add-ons. The more "vanilla" the better.

Motorola understood that, and their budget phones showed that people appreciated it. HTC later made a tablet in conjunction with Google, and it's clean interface was well received. I've looked at the newer tablets, and some discerning reviewers have noted that a lot of customers are happier when the vendors leave the default Android interface alone. That's what I'd look for, a clean interface.

P.S. lol, six years after buying the Flyer, I finally gave in and spent the money on a nTrig digital stylus that allows me write/draw/highlight in the tablet. Microsoft bought the tech and now uses it in their expensive Surface tablets.

It's neat, but not at all compelling. Any quality mid-range tablet will have enough oomph, I'd be shopping for bargains among those models getting phased out as newer ones come out. The better review sites know their stuff, seek them out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Flyer

 

[bgroovy]

It was surprisingly hard to find something good in that size, unfortunately. Most either have dismal specs and low res 1280x800 screens, or cost an arm and a leg. I'd look at Lenovo's current lineup as that's what I ended up with when I was buying a couple years back. Was able to find a decent model with a 1920x1200 IPS screen, 2GB RAM, quad core processor and mSD slot. It even unexpectedly got a an android upgrade from 5 to 6 after I had had it for a bit. Look for the Tab 3 10 which I think is probably the best option under $200.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

https://tabletunderbudget.com/best-tablets-under-200-dollars/

Samsung or Lenovo looks like your best bet.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Thanks all, I really appreciate it!

 

[cheapchips]

They were going to get the Fire10, but then I had to go and notice it doesn't run android.

This isn't strictly true. They run Android but replace all the Google stuff, like the appstore, with Amazon versions. The range of stuff on there is reasonable if you're not tied to Google products. My kids have Amazon tablets and it works well for them.

You can side load Google's appstore on most of Amazon's tablets. It's not totally straight forward, but nothing too complex.

Thinking of doing this myself at some point, as for the hardware they're good value.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

The Xiaomi Pad 4 WiFi is $170 I think, and they're probably the best with regularly updated OS and safety patches, and a Snapdragon 660. Only con is an 8" 1920*1200 screen instead of 10".
I don't know if you can get them in the US though.

If you absolutely need 10" then I'd go with the Huawei M3 Lite, but that one has a substantially slower S430 SoC.

 

[BRiT]

Disclaimer: I didn't want to create a new thread that would likely get identical replies, so I thought it might be alright if I post it here.

Are there any new Android Tablets on the horizon for early 2019? Any ones released in late 2018 that weren't mention?

My criteria is a bit broader. Cost is preferred to be under $500 unless the hardware is ace. Screen size and quality should be anywhere from 8" to 11" and must be at least resolution than 1200x800.

My current tablet is a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4". It's from 2014, only updated to Android 4.4 KitKat, and battery life isn't what it used to be. But the screen is great at 1600x2560. Spec Link: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_tab_pro_8_4-5946.php One option is for me to replace the battery [ https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Samsung+Galaxy+Tab+Pro+8.4+Battery+Replacement/73278 ]. But then it's still running the old OS and will still have the occasional issue with Apps not always working and uses older WIFI connections.

The Huawei M5 looks decent, but I'm not sure if it's HW is as new(er) spec as others.

The Xiaomi Pad 4 WiFi looks nice for the 8" but my weak search attempts only show it listed on eBay.

 

[bgroovy]

The Huwei M5 seems pretty good. Unlike a lot of the other Chinese brands it supports HD streaming from Netflix.

 

[BRiT]

Unlike a lot of the other Chinese brands it supports HD streaming from Netflix.

How is that even a thing? Thanks for pointing that out, now its something added to my investgation list for all tablets. Not that I need to stream on the tablets, but I wouldnt be pleased if I didnt have the option to if I wanted to. It's one of those "if it doesnt support this, what else doesnt it support?" lack of confidence.

One of the other surprise topics is a "BlueTooth +WIFI" speed conflict if you're using 2.4 Ghz WiFi for different tablets. The most recent I saw on it for M5 was its patched for maybe a 8% hit.

 

[orangpelupa]

If you want "free" smooth motion, buy tablet with Mediatek cpu.

Chinese tablets may not have proper widevine support for HD streaming.

If you use xiaomi, you need to disable ads to make it not annoying. The software update should be good for many years

If you want cheap Chinese oled tablet, look for alldocube brand

There's a website / YouTube specializing in Chinese tablet : techtablets

 

[BRiT]

References for others, related to the Netflix HD requirements here is the list of supported Tablets and Phones -- https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23939

As I understand it, the core of the matter is hardware support for DRM, specifically one needs Widevine Level 1 to get HD content streaming. If you only have Widevine Level 3 you're limited to 480p or 540p content.

 

[Svensk Viking]

With many Android devices losing support relatively fast, I now take great care choosing a brand known to be popular for custom ROMs. I installed LineageOS on both my Nexus 7 and Oneplus X (though the X recently became unsupported)

 

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

In case anyone is interested:

HTC Google Nexus 9 Tablet 8.9" 16GB Wi-Fi only Tablet for $99

https://www.ebay.com/itm/352267994075

 

[swaaye]

I have one of those. I bought it mostly because I wanted to see what Denver is like. Performance is pretty good but it seems like it has this latency to everything you do on it, perhaps the DCO doing its initial optimizations. Plus you lose an extra 256MB of the already low 2GB RAM to the DCO and that's definitely not good for your Android experience.

Gaming is not great on the N9 because the SOC is too hot to cool at high clocks in a fanless tablet. It throttles a lot, unless you get into undervolting, more conservative governors or perhaps just forcing reduced CPU clock speed. You are better off with the Shield K1 and its Tegra K1 A15 edition. You also get a newer GeForce driver with Vulkan there.

I'm running Lineage 14.1 because it works great and has up to date security patches. Google abandoned N9 in late 2017. Ports of Android 8 and 9 are semi-broken because the NVidia driver doesn't support some new stuff and this breaks video acceleration. NVidia doesn't support K1 at all anymore.

 

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

I have one of those. I bought it mostly because I wanted to see what Denver is like. Performance is pretty good but it seems like it has this latency to everything you do on it, perhaps the DCO doing its initial optimizations. Plus you lose an extra 256MB of the already low 2GB RAM to the DCO and that's definitely not good for your Android experience.

Gaming is not great on the N9 because the SOC is too hot to cool at high clocks in a fanless tablet. It throttles a lot, unless you get into undervolting, more conservative governors or perhaps just forcing reduced CPU clock speed. You are better off with the Shield K1 and its Tegra K1 A15 edition. You also get a newer GeForce driver with Vulkan there.

I'm running Lineage 14.1 because it works great and has up to date security patches. Google abandoned N9 in late 2017. Ports of Android 8 and 9 are semi-broken because the NVidia driver doesn't support some new stuff and this breaks video acceleration. NVidia doesn't support K1 at all anymore.

The N9 originally featured Android 5.0 Lollipop. It has been now updated to Android 7.1.1. Are the issues you state related to 7.1.1 or only earlier versions?

 

[swaaye]

The N9 originally featured Android 5.0 Lollipop. It has been now updated to Android 7.1.1. Are the issues you state related to 7.1.1 or only earlier versions?

I have only used 7.1.1 and 7.1.2. From what I've read around the web, it was worse with 5.x.

I think the main issue with it is insufficient RAM. It doesn't multitask well. So you have apps suspending/reloading often and this causes lag. It uses some of the 2GB RAM for the DCO and ZRAM swap. They should have gone with 3-4GB considering this was supposed to be a premium tablet and 5.0 in particular had memory problems.

This is also one of the first tablets with forced encryption on user storage IIRC. This seems to impact storage performance to some degree. I imagine it has some impact on CPU and battery too. It can be disabled by various means though.

For ~$100 it is certainly not a bad tablet to play with. It's fairly speedy for web browsing and email. I'd take this over something with Cortex A53s inside. WiFi is solid. EMMC relatively fast. My favorite screen aspect ratio too.

The XDA Nexus 9 forums are a good reference and interesting historical archive if you feel like checking that out.