Google seems to have called it quits on making its own Android tablets—again

Reports have the Pixel Tablet 2—or maybe 3?—being canceled over sales concerns.

See full article...

 

[minnibur]

Apple is less interested in market share and more interested in profitability and their "brand." A more affordable iPhone does nothing to further those goals.

Services are an increasingly large chunk of Apple's revenue so getting more people into their ecosystem, even on cheaper devices, is definitely in aid of their profitability.

 

[Carewolf]

It’s speculation and the usual false equivalence involving comparisons to Google, Apple Vision isn’t canceled. Apple iteration goes on behind the scenes. Apple just doesn’t talk about it.

Apple doesnt cancel products, they do silent quiting. They stop working on it, but keeps selling it, and only perhaps when 5 years have passed to they admit they stopped making the product.

 

[LexaGrey]

They stopped making them, though.

Apple is master of the supply channel. They stopped making first gen HomePods for a bit and even took them off the store site until demand built for them to release the next version. I can see the same with Vision Pro.

 

[jesse1]

As long as they are printing billions each quarter with their Advertising monopoly, they can afford to "fail" as much as they want.
However, whenever that monopoly ends... is going to be a bloodbath.

Google spends tons of money to successfully improve their search product for the business not the users. Thats what you all dont realize. The changes either driven by AI or engineers are meant to increase the profit margins not make you find exactly what you want.

If they found a magical box that read your mind and took you to exactly where you wanted to go Google wouldnt be able to make money under the ads business model. No business would want to pay money knowing full well there was an A-B path that was fixed and unmodifiable. Businesses pay for the ability to drive you somewhere else.

 

[VividVerism]

Isn't that how Microsoft started? Everyone else was in an entrenched position and Microsoft simply did it better and/or cheaper.

Granted this is harder now, but it can be done. The problem is that it would require Apple to start making lot of mistakes in a row and google to be firing on all cylinders. Both of these are unlikely at the moment.

Arguably that's how Google started. Their search engine was so different from all the established players when it launched, but so much better that they very quickly became so much of a default that their company name became the verb used for web searching in general.

 

[VividVerism]

It’s actually super hard.

• Design a support system to handle issues and questions
• Design several generations of products, meaning by the time v1 is for sale v2 is already in the finalization stage and v3 is on the drawing board
• Design several generations of OS to support the products.
• Design specific apps tailored to your product to make it stand out over the competition.

All in all it means planning to create and release six years of product just to create a foothold, ten years to become established.

Which makes it all the more bewildering when they start a new product line looking like they're trying to enter a market, giving up somewhere around step 2 when the first generation doesn't instantly sell like hotcakes.

 

[VividVerism]

I just Googled it (capitalized to emphasize that I was using Google Google to get this information) and Google's own "featured snippet" says it's 55% Apple to 45% Google worldwide. Not 70%, 45%.

I don't know if that number is correct or not. I just know that I've owned multiple Android tablets and they were all fucking awful, and now I own an iPad, and it's very much not awful. I doubt many of the however-many people using Android tablets are doing so by choice (though I know that some lost, misguided souls are deliberately choosing Android phones and tablets over iPhones and iPads).

I have no horse in this race (I've never found a fit for a tablet in my personal use cases) and no contradictory information, but if you're talking about the "AI Overview" at the top of the search results then you really ought to find an actual source backing that up. The AI Overview is just as vulnerable to hallucinations as any other LLM-based AI.

 

[Carnuntum]

Android phones are successful because a phone is a necessity and Android phones are cheap.

A tablet is not a necessity and they are generally not cheap, so they actually have to be appealing, with a strong and enduring ecosystem of tablet-specific apps and accessories. iPad has that, Android does not.

Exactly that. I keep wanting to switch to a full Android ecosystem to go with my Samsung S23, but the tablet support sucks, the Gemini nonsense popping up every five seconds sucks, and the Google messenger changes have sucked. The only reason I'm still with anything Android is Live Transcribe and Live Caption. They have the uncanny ability to take everything good and mess it up.

 

[Carnuntum]

Good for you?

I've owned a tablet of one sort or another since the Asus Transformer, and use them constantly, especially with a digitizer. All the functionality of a phone and notepads, rolled into over. 7-8" is great for on-the-go notes and reading books, 10-12" for more detailed notes and consuming or marking up documents and almost any PDF.

I could do most of that with a convertible laptop, but not as conveniently or well. Even my relatively petite Samsung Chromebook was bulky compared to my tablets, and I'd take it's firm factor over any Windows convertible or tablet I've seen.

Same here. My Apple iPad allows me to instantly switch to a European language/layout virtual keyboard - impossible to even get laptops here in the US with non - Qwerty keyboards. Handheld remote monitor for video productions, teleprompter, and fantastic mobile portfolio and e-reader when I leave my kindle home

 

[OrangeCream]

Which makes it all the more bewildering when they start a new product line looking like they're trying to enter a market, giving up somewhere around step 2 when the first generation doesn't instantly sell like hotcakes.

Other than the fact that this is SOP for Google at this point?

 

[Tinkiewinkle]

Compared to Android, iPadOS is awful (too many iPhone apps aren't iPad aware and work in some sort of iPhone screen emulation mode

What? That’s the experience on android for tablets. Unless you’re purposefully seeking out apps that are ancient most are optimized for the iPad.

 

[Abulia]

Those are Amazon Fire tablets. And yeah, they're pretty shit. But Amazon basically gives them away during sales as a way to hopefully get you locked into buying more shit from Amazon. The top end of anything from a couple generations ago usually stomps the bottom of the barrel junk.

Check out the sales of those things right now. $55 for an 8". They're only $100 normally. Or the "high-end" 11" Max for $140, $230 normally. Any iPad is going to shit all over those.

On top of the hardware being ass, they're not truly Android either. It's an Amazon fork without all the Google stuff that makes Android Android. It's really meant to be a gateway drug to more Amazon spending.

Thanks for making my point. The Android ecosystem is fractured. You’ve just made excuses for a device that consumers should just be able to buy and have work.

Just like Apple does.

 

[rfunk]

What? That’s the experience on android for tablets. Unless you’re purposefully seeking out apps that are ancient most are optimized for the iPad.

I've never had the awful iPhone-on-iPad experience on Android 8" tablets. In Android they just get big, but use the full screen in native resolution. On the iPad, Instagram for example uses only part of the screen and uses a low-res emulation mode.

It looks like iOS encourages developers to design to specific screen sizes, while Android encourages responsive design for a wide variety of screen sizes.

 

[OrangeCream]

I've never had the awful iPhone-on-iPad experience on Android 8" tablets. In Android they just get big, but use the full screen in native resolution. On the iPad, Instagram for example uses only part of the screen and uses a low-res emulation mode.

It looks like iOS encourages developers to design to specific screen sizes, while Android encourages responsive design for a wide variety of screen sizes.

It only looks like that if you’ve never used an iPad recently, or you’re using a 10 year old app.

They’ve made iPad apps resolution and screen size independent for a long time now:
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/layoutDesign a layout that adapts gracefully to context changes while remaining recognizably consistent. People expect your experience to work well and remain familiar when they rotate their device, resize a window, add another display, or switch to a different device.

It makes sense if you think about. 7 iPad screen sizes, 14 different screen widths when you take rotation into account, plus the ability to use HDMI means also supporting standard HD and 4k screens. In 2019 they added multiple window support to iPadOS, meaning you could resize iPad apps. In 2015 they added split screen support, meaning two iPad apps could run side by side.

This has been a solved problem for just about a decade now, suggesting you’ve never used an iPad since it’s release.

 

[ERIFNOMI]

Thanks for making my point. The Android ecosystem is fractured. You’ve just made excuses for a device that consumers should just be able to buy and have work.

Just like Apple does.

I didn't make excuses. I was shitting all over the Fire tablets. They're awful. Amazon is a shit company putting out shit products to take try to take advantage of their customers.

It's not just their dogshit tablets either. Their Echo smart displays are fucking awful too. They display ads all the time. Apparently the smart speakers slip ads into their replies as well. They're just broadcasting ads at users and yet they still lose money somehow.

People like the Kindle devices, but those too are ad machines. The cheap versions are an ad billboard you carry around with you.

 

[icwhatudidthere]

It only looks like that if you’ve never used an iPad recently, or you’re using a 10 year old app.

They’ve made iPad apps resolution and screen size independent for a long time now:
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/layoutDesign a layout that adapts gracefully to context changes while remaining recognizably consistent. People expect your experience to work well and remain familiar when they rotate their device, resize a window, add another display, or switch to a different device.

It makes sense if you think about. 7 iPad screen sizes, 14 different screen widths when you take rotation into account, plus the ability to use HDMI means also supporting standard HD and 4k screens. In 2019 they added multiple window support to iPadOS, meaning you could resize iPad apps. In 2015 they added split screen support, meaning two iPad apps could run side by side.

This has been a solved problem for just about a decade now, suggesting you’ve never used an iPad since its release.

That’s not accurate. The developer still has to target the iPad and make an iPad version of their app. And there are still plenty of apps that don’t do that, sometimes on purpose. Bluesky was my most recent disappointment. No iPad version so you get the horrible scaled up iPhone experience instead.

 

[Vospier]

Have you used those Samsung tablets? I've purchased $300 tablet from samsung, their A series. Clunky and slow. those $150 E series tablets are unusable. They are made for suckers who think they are getting something good because it has Samsung branding on it.

Yes those cheap tablets are horrible. This is my experience with these tablets in 3 years:

I started out with an Android cheap tablet from Asus. It broke down within a year. I then bought a Samsung Tab A-series - the battery was broken within a year of normal usage (they report 100% charge but quickly discharge on standby and become 0% within 2 hours). The price of 2 of these cheap tablets would have covered the cost of an iPad Mini. That's on top of the fact that these tablets won't see meaningful updates after 1+ year after release.

I eventually did buy an iPad Mini 5 in 2020 and it's into its 5th year of operation and still working fine despite almost daily usage.

 

[melgross]

Err you don't realise that Android has about 70% of the tablet market globally?

Yes. Mostly tablets costing from $29 to $100. Mostly in countries where people can’t afford anything fetter and use them for be[riwsing, maybe buying so nothing, texting, Tv shows Nd movies. But not for much actual co mputation such as video anf]d photo editing, etc.

the problem that market has it that the company oanues that do the statistics on sales, reasons why, usage, etc., report that while Apple has about 30$ of the smartphone market share, the App Store sell about twice the amount, in dollars as do the various Android stores, which. Eans that each smartphone owner on iOS buys, on average, six times as much software, in dollars, this goes for subscriptions as well.

yes, we’re talking about tablets and that a reason this is important. Most tablet apps are full tablet versions of phone apps on iOS, or apps developed just for the iPad. With that much sales and Apple’s tables also selling notetty well and with better performance, generally, these vssles transkate over to Apple’s tablets. Nay times if you buy an iPhone app and there’s a real tablet version available, you will get that one for free and visa versa. That even holds true for tha Watch.

but on the Android side, with the much lower sales of apps in dollars, there’s hardly any incentive to write tablet specific apps for the small Android tablet market among those tablets sold where it might be expected that people will buy the software.

This has been going on since 2011 when the first iPads came out and shortly after the first, smaller android tablets came out. In the beginning, for over two years, Google didn’t even offer any tablet app support and told companies to not allow their phone apps to run in tablets. It’s never really recovered from that.

 

[melgross]

That’s not accurate. The developer still has to target the iPad and make an iPad version of their app. And there are still plenty of apps that don’t do that, sometimes on purpose. Bluesky was my most recent disappointment. No iPad version so you get the horrible scaled up iPhone experience instead.

There are hundreds of thousands of actual, iPad apps out there. It’s true that some developers don’t bother.

 

[SubWoofer2]

Plenty. Most streaming sites only allow offline downloads in the app.

Lots of websites these days try to detect if you’re on a mobile device and present a watered down site or push you to the app like reddit.

Of course there’s also gaming.

ETA: ebooks and comic readers too.

Don't you FOSS your device?

 

[jhesse]

Same here. My Apple iPad allows me to instantly switch to a European language/layout virtual keyboard - impossible to even get laptops here in the US with non - Qwerty keyboards.

At least in the US, you can custom order from Apple a Macbook with almost keyboard you want:

(Couldn't find any equivalent for Dell)

 

[NeoMorpheus]

I see this mentioned a lot, but is it true? I spend easily 90% of my time on my iPad Mini in a browser. The few times I leave it is to watch a video, in which case a phone app blown up is perfectly fine, as I'm just after full screen video.

What do you do in an app on a tablet you can't do in a browser?

I was burned by Google on the tablet area 3 times and decided to get an iPad.

Currently typing this on an iPad Pro 13 2018.

I personally like to use apps when possible, especially when certain places hide functionality behind them.

I can mention 3 apps that suck ass on ipad, citibank, instagram and bluesky. They are iphone apps that would run at double the space (or whatever its called) on ipads.

I dont like logging into serious sites (like my bank) using the same browser that i use for other less important sites, but since apple doesnt allow the usage of other proper browsers engines in iOS, the experience sucks, since the code on top of safari makes them less stable. Example, i like to use Brave browser, since it has a proper ad blocking, but it has the nasty habit of “forgetting “ open tabs, with no way to recover them.
Their support clearly informs that its due to being forced to use safari underneath.

Then you bump into apple bs of protecting their Mac lines by artificially limiting iPadOS functionality.

About the google tablets cancellation, i think i read somewhere that they might had canceled the proper 3rd gen tablet due to be replaced by whatever it is they are planning with android and chromeOS, so there might be more tablets.

 

[launcap]

Personally, I use iPad. Because that’s the ecosystem I’m in. If I were on android, buying a Google product would be a hard buy, they dropped far too many products to want to continue. I’ve done well not to be burned much, but they even go out of their way to buy companies (Nest) and then upend the user experience. So you are never really safe from their potential pitfalls unless you stick to a huge company like Apple, Samsung, Amazon, etc.

I do have an Android tablet (A Nokia T21 - no crapware, just standard Android and still being updated. Not terribly expensive either).

I chose it because of my use-case - I buy books from Amazon, download and DeDRM them then use Calibre to load them onto the tablet where I read the books using FBReader.

Doing it under Android is fairly easy - the utilities that I use (Calibre Sync mainly) are either payware on iOS or don't exist so doing it on iOS is significantly more difficult.

My wife has 2 iPads - one very old one that she just uses for podcasts (The Archers podcast, the Infinite Monkey cage et. al.) and the one she uses for watching stuff on iPlayer while she 'works from home'..

I do have an iPad but it's a managed work iPad so does very little.

[Edit]

I've had a variety of Android tablets - a Nexus 7 (the one where the storage got slower and slower as it got used!) some no-name really cheap one (got binned quite quickly) and an Amazon Fire 10. Which I used for a good while until Amazon nerfed it one too many times and I got fed up with it.

 

[CommanderJameson]

What? That’s the experience on android for tablets. Unless you’re purposefully seeking out apps that are ancient most are optimized for the iPad.

Indeed, it’s why we piss and moan when XYZ app isn’t iPad optimised - we have come to expect our iPad apps to be iPad-ified.

No-one pisses and moans that their Android tablet apps are dogshit Big Phone apps, because that’s the norm.

 

[jhodge]

I didn't make excuses. I was shitting all over the Fire tablets. They're awful. Amazon is a shit company putting out shit products to take try to take advantage of their customers.

I disagree - most people that I know who have bought Fire tablets are quite happy with them. They just bought them for the use case they're intended for - consuming media from Amazon (and other providers to a lesser extent). For which they're fine. They play movies, have the Kindle app, have the apps for the major streaming services, etc. They also come in ruggedized 'kids' versions. That's what they're for (and the pricing reflects that - the very latest 'Fire Max 11' is $159)

If you are trying to push them in to being productivity or creativity tools, yeah, they're going to suck. Just like a Chromebook would be a lousy tool for a video producer and a Mac would be a lousy choice for a gaming PC. In all of those cases you may be able to 'make it work', but it's not the intended use case and it's going to be suboptimal.

 

[HiroTheProtagonist]

I think that may depend on what country you're in.

I use voice calls every day, and SMS regularly.
It works.

Not only that, but at least with my Pixel phone, the apps for voice calls and SMS has gotten pretty good at auto-filtering actual scam/spam. Doesn't mean that it's perfect, but at least nowadays I can be reasonably sure that a phone call that isn't flagged is either something worth answering or someone with a wrong number rather than yet another WE'RE TRYING TO REACH YOU ABOUT YOUR CAR'S EXTENDED WARRANTY.

 

[OrangeCream]

That’s not accurate. The developer still has to target the iPad and make an iPad version of their app. And there are still plenty of apps that don’t do that, sometimes on purpose. Bluesky was my most recent disappointment. No iPad version so you get the horrible scaled up iPhone experience instead.

I see. You think dedicated tablet apps are a problem and not a solution.

Android lacking tablet apps isn’t actually helping Google sell Pixel tablets.

Skeets is a 3rd party iPad app for Bluesky:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skeets-for-bluesky/id6466340923

Bluesky also works fine in Safari:
https://bsky.app/
And a review from someone trying out Android tablets:
https://www.tomsguide.com/features/i-switched-from-my-ipad-to-an-android-tablet-heres-what-happenedYou can see a fairly standard version of tablet Android on the Nokia T20. Perhaps if you've never used an iPad, you would just assume all tablets are afflicted with similarly unoptimized apps. But that's just not the case with iPads, which Apple sees as having such meaningfully different software needs from the iPhone that iOS and iPadOS are now two related but separate systems.

Perhaps if Google can improve Android's big screen abilities, as the new Android 12Lupdate has showed to strong effect, then the gap can be closed. For now though, default Android is a poor rival for iPadOS.

Essentially you’re pointing out an exception when you bring up Bluesky.

 

[icwhatudidthere]

I see. You think dedicated tablet apps are a problem and not a solution.

Android lacking tablet apps isn’t actually helping Google sell Pixel tablets.

Skeets is a 3rd party iPad app for Bluesky:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skeets-for-bluesky/id6466340923

Bluesky also works fine in Safari:
https://bsky.app/
And a review from someone trying out Android tablets:
https://www.tomsguide.com/features/i-switched-from-my-ipad-to-an-android-tablet-heres-what-happenedYou can see a fairly standard version of tablet Android on the Nokia T20. Perhaps if you've never used an iPad, you would just assume all tablets are afflicted with similarly unoptimized apps. But that's just not the case with iPads, which Apple sees as having such meaningfully different software needs from the iPhone that iOS and iPadOS are now two related but separate systems.

Perhaps if Google can improve Android's big screen abilities, as the new Android 12Lupdate has showed to strong effect, then the gap can be closed. For now though, default Android is a poor rival for iPadOS.

Essentially you’re pointing out an exception when you bring up Bluesky.

Nope. I'm not OP but I think dedicated tablet apps are better when they're available. But when they're not, I'd rather see Android's approach of scaling up elements to fill the screen rather than Apple's iPhone app on big screen approach.

Also I was merely pointing out that your claim "It only looks like that if you’ve never used an iPad recently, or you’re using a 10 year old app." is inaccurate. The iPhone app on iPad experience does still happen today, it's not an automatic fix and it does require a developer to do the work.

The Bluesky app on iPad is one current example, but there are plenty of others; it's hardly an exception. Other new apps that don't have iPad versions: Nintendo Music, Battle.net, Google Gemini, Mila Air, Riot Mobile, Steam Chat, Official MTA app, Crate and Barrel and CB2 and of course, famously, Instagram.

 

[Random_stranger]

The Nexus 7 was so well received it spawned a "retrofit into your car to add nav/mp3 support to your old car" sub-usage model. I started down that road, got as far as buying one, flashing TIMURs rom, hacking in a charger into my car, cutting out a bezel / holder to fit into one of the unused slots in my dash, etc..

Car broke and I sold it before I could finish the job, but others liked it quite a bit.

 

[OrangeCream]

Nope. I'm not OP but I think dedicated tablet apps are better when they're available. But when they're not, I'd rather see Android's approach of scaling up elements to fill the screen rather than Apple's iPhone app on big screen approach.

Also I was merely pointing out that your claim "It only looks like that if you’ve never used an iPad recently, or you’re using a 10 year old app." is inaccurate. The iPhone app on iPad experience does still happen today, it's not an automatic fix and it does require a developer to do the work.

The Bluesky app on iPad is one current example, but there are plenty of others; it's hardly an exception. Other new apps that don't have iPad versions: Nintendo Music, Battle.net, Google Gemini, Mila Air, Riot Mobile, Steam Chat, Official MTA app, Crate and Barrel and CB2 and of course, famously, Instagram.

Right, I get that. The issue is the developer not creating an iPad app, not the iPhone UI failing to scale to iPad screen sizes.

Apple used this as a carrot and stick. Developers who don’t write an iPad app see the 2x/3x scaling applied to their apps. If a developer doesn’t care then it works well enough, but app competition means developers who write iPhone, iPad, Watch, and AppleTV have an advantage over the developers who don’t. Ironically if they want a scaling UI then they need to create an iPad app.

Google decided instead of a 2x/3x solution they would create a scalable UI that adapted to the screen size. That means developers don’t see any advantage in creating tablet specific apps.

A decade later and there is a richer iPad app selection than Android tablet app selection. That Apple doesn’t have the scaling iPhone UI is a conscious decision. Only the iPad gets that feature.

 

[Midnitte]

Tablets suck without tablet-specific apps. Developers don’t make tablet-specific apps unless there’s a lot of tablets, AND they believe there will be long-term support.

In other words, Google is screwed unless they give away tablets or pay developers to make apps, and even THEN they’re probably hosed (Stadia, anyone?)

I wouldn't be surprised if Foldables end up leading to an increase in app support, but Google really screwed things up by getting rid of the cheap Nexus tablet and taking so long to add support to their own apps.

Do what we say, not what we do.

 

[itfa]

Besides using them as ebook readers, I've given up on android tablets as well. Turns out most of what I use a tablet for is watching videos, and it turns out that everybody streaming videos these days has an app that completely shoves ads down your throat. I started buying those little surface go tablets on ebay for like $100 including keyboard, and now I can watch my videos in peace with a strong adblocker in place.

 

[omarsidd]

Inconsistent product efforts, poorly supported, few specialized apps, quickly killed off without warning... why aren't people spending their hard-earned money on this?! /s smdh Google.

 

[melgross]

How are Android tablets not cheap? The cheapest currently-supported Samsung tablet costs 159 euros here. And that's just Samsung, a famous brand, with an overall pleasant-to-use if basic product; there are manufacturers selling cheaper, less nice ones. The cheapest iPad is 399, as a point of comparison.

And indeed global Android market share is not that low in the tablet market. But yes, tablets being nice-to-haves instead of essentials does play a role.

You have your prices wrong. The 10.5” mainstream iPad starts at $329, not $399 and is often in sales first under $300. I just saw it in sale for $259 for Black Friday. I don’t know why it would be $399 Euros there even with import tariffs. Unless it includes that incredibly high 20 or 21% VAT.

 

[TVPaulD]

You have your prices wrong. The 10.5” mainstream iPad starts at $329, not $399 and is often in sales first under $300. I just saw it in sale for $259 for Black Friday. I don’t know why it would be $399 Euros there even with import tariffs. Unless it includes that incredibly high 20 or 21% VAT.

I don't know what specific country Mariupolo is in, but in most EU countries listed prices are generally required to include VAT. The iPad starts at €419 in Ireland for example. €409 in France & Italy. €399 in Germany & Spain.

 

[rfunk]

It only looks like that if you’ve never used an iPad recently, or you’re using a 10 year old app.

This has been a solved problem for just about a decade now, suggesting you’ve never used an iPad since it’s release.

Tell that to the Instagram and Bluesky apps on my 6th-gen iPad Mini that I’m using right now.

What is with people not believing the actual experience I’m describing?

 

[OrangeCream]

Tell that to the Instagram and Bluesky apps on my 6th-gen iPad Mini that I’m using right now.

What is with people not believing the actual experience I’m describing?

Yeah, I already conceded that developers that don’t release iPad apps don’t get to use the scalable UI.

Apple for whatever reason keeps the scalable UI an iPad only feature, and doesn’t (yet) make iPhone apps capable of using that UI feature.

My point was that Apple also has that same feature, as well as allowing multiple apps on the same screen and resizing of those apps, but only if they are coded specifically for the iPad.

 

[mariupolo]

Have you used those Samsung tablets? I've purchased $300 tablet from samsung, their A series. Clunky and slow. those $150 E series tablets are unusable. They are made for suckers who think they are getting something good because it has Samsung branding on it.

I don't know what E series tablets are; I was referring to the Galaxy Tab A9 line (the A9 is $150 in the US, 159 euros in Italy; the A9+ is 179 euros in Germany, for instance, from the official website). They're a bit slow but perfectly usable. My mother has been using a tablet from the Galaxy Tab A line for 4 years; not bad for reading the news and browsing recipes. But anyway, my point was that Android tablets are cheap, which they indisputably are.