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.