Here are the top tablets available for purchase today, as determined by our extensive hands-on testing and evaluation of the leading models.
Having spent decades testing and reviewing tablets, I have helped individuals of various ages select the best tablet within their budget. For most, I suggest the M3 iPad Air as it offers a premium experience similar to the iPad Pro at a significantly lower cost.
If you’re looking for a budget-friendly option for casual browsing or video streaming, the Amazon Fire 7 is an excellent choice that won’t break the bank. For those preferring Android and willing to spend a bit more, the OnePlus Pad 2 is an outstanding alternative.
Our recommendations are based on thorough testing and knowledge of these devices’ capabilities and limitations. We stand by our picks, but we encourage you to read the detailed reviews and performance analyses available through the links for each product.
Top Tablet Choices
The M3 iPad Air represents an unchanged design and display but significantly upgraded internals with its latest chip. It quickly became my top tablet choice.
At a glance, it offers more of the same, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Both the 11-inch and 13-inch models feature a slim, functional aluminum design that I adore, paired with a light 1.05-pound frame that is incredibly easy to handle with one hand.
The Liquid Retina display provides crisp, vibrant visuals — not quite as stunning as the iPad Pro’s OLED screen, but still impressive for viewing all my favorite content, like the latest episodes of Severance season 2.
The real difference lies in what’s inside. The M3 chip delivers a performance boost of up to 17% in our tests, including a notable increase in single-core speeds, ensuring everything feels swift and smooth (while also enhancing the Apple Intelligence functions).
Although this impacts battery life slightly, you still get around the 10-hour mark, as Apple promises.
There are a few drawbacks with this top tablet choice. Frustratingly, it still lacks Face ID support — a feature that would be perfect for this model.
And if you’re looking to fully utilize your new iPad Air, be prepared for expensive peripherals. Starting at $269 for the Magic Keyboard, you might end up spending as much as you would on a brand new M4 MacBook Air.
However, these are minor issues for what I consider the best tablet for the majority of users. The M3 chip does not disappoint, the display and speakers provide a fantastic multimedia experience, and the battery life is dependable — all within a sleek, lasting design.
- ^ Back to the top
Amazon’s Fire tablets are some of the cheapest slates you can buy, and the Amazon Fire 7 is the least expensive yet. It’s not the best performer, but for the $60 asking price (or $75 if you want it without ads) there’s no better budget tablet on the market.
That low low asking price is the No. 1 reason why I think this is the best budget tablet, but there are other nice things we can say about the Fire 7. It’s quite light and easy to carry since it weighs under a pound (9.9 ounces), and it lasted for nearly 11 hours in our battery tests — which is almost as good as our top pick, the iPad Air, which costs roughly 10x as much. Plus, it sports a microSD port which lets you slot in additional memory (up to 1TB) via microSD cards. That’s a feature not even Apple’s fanciest tablets can match.
Now for the bad parts: this is a cheap tablet, and it feels like it. The slim, rounded plastic chassis doesn’t feel as nice as the metal and glass you get on fancier tablets like the iPads, and the thick bezels around the screen make the slate feel chintzy. Worse, they surround a fuzzy 7-inch (1024 x 600 pixels) LCD screen which performed poorly in our display tests and has a resolution too low to support HD video. So if you want a cheap tablet for streaming movies and TV shows, I recommend saving up for the Amazon Fire HD 10. It costs twice as much as the cheap Fire 7, but it has a screen capable of displaying HD content at 1080p, which is the minimum you want for a quality viewing experience.
The built-in cameras and speakers are also pretty poor, and you could do better with every other tablet on this list. But every other tablet on this list is also far more expensive than the Fire 7, and I think this sub-$100
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Tobias Nguyen covers mobile technology and social media trends. He combines a background in digital marketing with a passion for emerging tech to provide readers with data-driven insights and practical tech usage tips.