I need some advice, and the amount of marketing spam had made sorting the wheat from the chaff annoyingly difficult. Hopefully you can help.
I’ve a young daughter, who uses an old tablet of mine to watch netflix etc. unfortunately, it was old in the tooth when she was born, and it’s now become extremely annoying to use.
She currently has a Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2016). The size (10") works well, but it’s gotten slow as sin, and only has 16Gb of internal memory.
Preferences wise:
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10" screen (±2")
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64Gb+ storage.
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Long expected lifespan (inc security updates).
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Headphone socket (adapters are asking to get broken, Bluetooth go flat)
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Decent WiFi (more than just 2.4Ghz).
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USB C charging preferred.
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Wireless charging would be very helpful but not required.
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Lower budget preferred (£200 range).
What would people recommend?
I recently got both my kids a Lenovo Xiaoxin Pad 2022 each. They are the same as a Lenovo M10 Gen3 except they have the better Qualcomm Snapdragon 680 chipset and 4GB Ram, plus unlike the M10 they have a Dolby Vision licence and Netflix certification. They are affordable within your budget. You can buy them from china from AliExpress, and you can ask the seller for the Global Rom installed, that has english language and Play store enabled.
They are a popular kids tablet in China, used in schools and such, they have lots of good protective cases available online. Cases for the M10 Gen3 also fit.
That does look like a promising option. It’s one I hadn’t run across too.
If you’re thinking about going this option, there is one more point to consider. I’ve read that if you get the Xiaoxin Pad 2022 with the Global Rom installed, it’s simply the rom from the M10 Gen3, so you lose the Netflix certification and Dolby Vision stuff, plus it no longer can receive OTA updates.
With ours, I asked for the tablets “sealed box” condition with the Chinese ROM, you can switch it to English during the initial setup and you can sideload Google Play Store if you know how. They recently got the OTA update to Android 13, and the experience overall is pretty great for a cheap tablet. My kids usually just watch YouTube and Netflix on them, and play some small kids games.
I’d look at the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+
https://m.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_tab_a9+-12617.php
Also, a factory reset on the tablet might get it to run a bit better again.
That looks like a good option. Thanks!
I had completely missed that one.
The current tablet is as fast I as I can make it. I’ve also disabled, and uninstalled all I can, to free up space. 16Gb doesn’t go far, when most streaming services don’t allow installing or buffering to an SD card.
It’s also not had a security update since 2020.
Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2016
Regarding the security update situation you could try using LineageOS on it - but I imagine that would be for your use, not your daughters.
https://xdaforums.com/t/lineageos-19-1-for-sm-t580-gtaxlwifi-sm-t585-gtaxllte-sm-p580-gtanotexlwifi-and-sm-p585-gtanotexllte.4432957/
Honestly, I bought my kid a used Chromebook. No regrets. Lots of benefits.
Fire Tabs are pretty good spec and their kid focused ones are well built. Really young Fire tab kids "7 HD kids pro if their pre-teen
Huge disagree on the Fire tablets, especially the 7”. The one we have is unusable with how laggy and slow it is.
Agreed. Fire tablets are garbage. Super slow, outdated tech designed to shovel ads at your kids.
The uncomfortable truth is the best tablet for kids is a new iPad Air. It’ll be up to date for its lifespan of years and the parental controls, ecosystem and screentime functionality make it great for kids.
You can hate Apple but as a parent the iPad is great for kids.
I got a Fire Kids tablet for my kid to use occasionally, but the interface is so horrible and the parental controls are abysmally bad, it’s been trash from the get-go. I wish I could figure out how to get stock Android on it.
Both my kids (4 and 7) use fire tablets and we have the subscription with it to get them access to lots of free apps.
I put memory cards in both, as what they come with is insufficient. The older versions we had were a little janky, but we haven’t really had any issues with the current ones.
The parental controls could be better but work okay. In the kids version of the interface you don’t really see ads, just app recommendations. Some of the apps still have gated content, but it hasn’t really been an issue.
Honestly an updated tab a wouldn’t be a bad call. I’ve got a 2019 tab a7 that’s still going strong. Granted it only has 32gb of storage but you can get one that has 64. They can be had secondhand for pretty cheap (75-150 range)
