IPad? Never heard of it.
I have been using Android tablets pretty much since the first one came out, and I’ve never felt the need for anything made by any fruit companies. Android tablets make great “nice to have” entertainment centers, or they can be complete lightweight laptop replacements for travel.
Whatever your use case, I’ve tested just about all the Android tablets out there, and these are the best, depending on what you need them for. If you want to see how these stack up next to those iPad things, check out our guide to all the tablets on the market.
Be sure to check out our other buying guides, including the Best Amazon Fire Tablets, Best iPad, and Best iPad Accessories.
Table of Contents
The Best Android Tablet
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
The best overall Android tablet I’ve tried in the OnePlus Pad 3. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip offers great performance, with plenty of power for gaming, photo editing, and watching 4K video. The 13.2-inch LCD screen offers an excellent 3.4K resolution with a 144-Hz refresh rate (again great for gaming), and 12-bit color. Would I like to see an OLED screen? Sure, but no tablet at this price has one, not even the iPad Air. The Pad 3’s screen is one of the nicer LCD panels I’ve tested, and easy to read even in bright sunlight. One of the nice things about the LCD rather than OLED screen is that the Pad 3 has excellent battery life. I’ve watched back-to-back movies on plane flights and barely dipped below the halfway mark, and thanks to the 80-watt fast-charging point, you can recharge to 50 percent in under half an hour, with a full recharge taking about 1.5 hours. I also love that it loses hardly any power in standby mode. OnePlus rates it to 70 days of standby mode, but that’s with the WiFi off. In the real world, I can leave it lying around for a week, and it’ll still have 70 percent charge.
Part of the reason I think the Pad 3 is the best tablet for most people is that not only is it great for consuming content (it’s how I watch the majority of the baseball games I watch), it’s possible to get work done on it as well. OnePlus’ OxygenOS software is the best multi-tasking UI for Android tablets. I even prefer it to Apple’s iPadOS thanks to its Open Canvas system. Using Open Canvas, you can place three apps side by side, which is admittedly cramped, but still useful, or you can do what I do and use apps two side by side and expand a third at the bottom and scroll down to get to it. For me, that means a text editor at the bottom, which I effectively use in full screen, and then I can scroll up to get to my web browser and secondary app, which live side-by-side. It’s a great way to work; the only drawback is the OnePlus Pad keyboard, which I don’t love.
The keyboard is sold separately for $200 (it’s currently unavailable in the US), and while it’s a fine keyboard, with good key travel and a decent-sized trackpad, it really only works on a perfectly flat surface. In other words, it’s fine if you’re sitting at a table of some sort, but pretty much unusable in your lap. It really limits the usefulness of the Pad 3, and I’m hoping OnePlus will improve the design in a future version. Unfortunately, that’s somewhat unlikely as OnePlus is currently in a merger with Realme and its future is murky to say the least. We’ve already seen the Pad 4 debut in India (with little more than a chip and battery update), but so far, nothing for the rest of the world.
The Luxury Android Tablet
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Samsung
Galaxy Tab S11 and Tab S11 Ultra
Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11 and Tab S11 Ultra are the iPad Pro of the Android world. They’ve got the flagship specs, and at a mere 0.20 inches thick (5.1 mm), the Ultra matches the look at well. They are slightly heavier than an iPad Pro, but not enough that I actually notice the difference. Unlike the prior generation Tab S10 series, there’s no middle “Plus” model anymore. You have the 11-inch Tab S11 and the biggie, the 14.6-inch Tab S11 Ultra. Both run Android 16 out of the box, have 120-Hz AMOLED displays, and can hit a peak brightness of 1,600 nits. Samsung uses a MediaTek processor, the Dimensity 9400+, which is closely matched to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite in the OnePlus Pad. Both models get 12 GB of RAM (if you go for the 1-terabyte Ultra model, the RAM goes up to 16 GB). Storage is expandable via microSD.
