With the ongoing…everything shortage, the constant price increases, and the actually simple-to-fulfill tech requirements of most people, people are trying to get the most out of their less-valuable dollars on their tablet space. Be careful. Cheap Android tablets may be fun to tinker with, but they will not do quite well with the Tech-Adjacent
Thanks to Zoomers, now I have a…less offensive way to refer to those for whom technology is a neat thing that happens to other people. The ones who every five years have to be dragged kicking and screaming into sometime a couple of years behind the present. If they could stay roughly that removed from the present we’d have no complaints. But in a startling display of Newtonian principles, they will remain on the tech spot you left them until it is essentially impossible for them to do so. It’s one thing to not make your house “Smart”. It’s another to not make your house smart by making your landline the most advanced device in your house.
Naturally, their reluctance of movement extends to their attitudes towards cost reduction in their technological life. So whenever one of them comes up and says they need a tablet (they never do say the word “tablet” they describe their computing needs and you kinda figure it out) they always want it outside of the value-for-money scale. The base iPad, perennial device of choice for the person who doesn’t want to think very hard about their tablet purchase is right out.
And the problem there is that there are basically two choices when it comes to tablets around the $100 mark. Weird no name tablets from manufacturers whose name you’ve never heard and whose specs sound like a low powered device from 10 years ago (Yes, even when Android tablets hadn’t existed for over 10 years); Or the Amazon Kindle Fire series.
The specs are similarly terrible on most of them, to the point where making a kids version of them is possibly the smartest thing they could’ve done to lock on a market that will readily accept them. A 1024x600 screen will bring bad memories of netbooks to anyone who made it through that particular technology fad. And, of course, there’s the reason the thing is so cheap anyway…it exists to sell you more Amazon stuff. Google Play? Not really. Not unless you do a procedure that I’m sure the tech-adjacent in your life will totally understand.
Going slightly up from the magic Benjamin you can find things like the Galaxy Tab A7 Lite if you look hard enough. And then up from there a series of Samsung and Lenovo tablets that will complete the incredibly difficult tasks of “finding a recipe” and “watching Netflix” with ease. However, that still comes with some disadvantages. Namely, the lack of care which google has given to an Android experience on a tablet since Honeycomb and that only now they are attempting to rectify as a response to five or so years of Apple eating their lunch.
Which means that, as of writing this, if you absolutely must have a really really cheap tablet…get a used iPad
