Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
I'm continually impressed by how powerful tablets have become. A few years ago, it felt like the tablet market consisted of the iPad and little else, but now there's a flourishing market of Android tablets.
And they're cheap.
Also: I finally found a lightweight multitool that doesn't sacrifice function for form - and it's only $30
You can pick up a very good tablet for under $150. Take, for example, the Tabwee T80. This packs a lot of tech into, well, a 10.1-inch tablet.
This is an Android 15 tablet -- according to Tabwee, it will be upgradable to Android 16 at some point -- equipped with a Unisoc T310 octa-core processor, 1,280 x 800 pixels, 178-degree wide viewing angle screen, 6GB of RAM (you can bump this up a further 12GB using virtual RAM to get better, smoother performance), 128GB of storage, and a microSD card slot capable of taking up to 2TB.
This hardware is perfectly acceptable for powering the Android operating system, even allowing it to run Gemini AI 2.0 assistant and pretty much any app or game you throw at it.
The system gets its power from a 6,000mAh battery, offers about five hours of web browsing, or about four hours of video playback or gaming. If that isn't enough, the tablet supports 10W fast charging using the USB-C port.
There's also the obligatory set of cameras -- a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, and a 5-megapixel main camera -- that are nothing special, but perfectly acceptable for social media snaps and video calling.
The Tabwee T80 comes with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and stylus. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
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