A cheap tablet hampered by outdated software

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A cheap tablet hampered by outdated software

The latest

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***** HD 8, updated last month and starting at $100, is a modest refresh, offering more RAM, a nominally upgraded camera and some new AI features. The general sales pitch, however, ******** the same: You get a just-competent tablet for the essentials at a dirt-cheap (and often-discounted) price, and in exchange,

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gets to plant another appliance for its own apps and services in your home. Nothing about this update drastically changes that agreement, but after using the tablet for the past month (and after using older ***** tablets for years prior), it may be time to demand more from

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’s end of the bargain.

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The ***** HD 8 ******** a decent value for a casual media consumption tablet, particularly when it’s on *****, but its iffy display and ad-heavy software make it less appealing at full price.

*****

• Cheap, and frequently discounted
• Lightweight and comfortable to hold
• Improved performance over prior generation
• Good battery life
• Has a microSD slot and headphone jack

*****

• ***** OS is ad-heavy and
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  -centric to the point of hostility
• Limited app selection
• Display needs a refresh
• Poor cameras
• Still only powerful enough for light gaming and media consumption

$55 at Kohl’s

It’s definitely a cheap tablet

Physically, the new ***** HD 8 is nearly identical to the last one. It is, without a doubt, A Budget Tablet — it’s nowhere near premium, but it doesn’t feel distractingly cheap either. At just under eight inches tall and 0.37 inches thick, it’s small enough for most kids to operate without much struggle and most adults to carry with one hand. If you care more about your tablet’s travel-friendliness than its virtues as a miniature TV, this size should be fine. The whole thing is lightweight at 0.74 pounds, so it’s not an anchor in your bag. Its textured plastic frame is somewhat slippery but altogether sturdy, with no creaking or flexing. Its gently rounded edges dig comfortably into your palms. There are fairly thick bezels around the display, but I’ve never minded those on a tablet — they give your thumbs a natural place to rest.

The display won’t win any awards. It’s the same LCD panel

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has trotted out in previous generations, with the same 1,280 x 800 resolution. If you’ve used any iPad, or even many midrange Android tablets, in the last decade, everything about it will be an obvious downgrade. The meager pixel density (189 ppi) makes images and text visibly less sharp. Colors are more muted, too. It doesn’t get bright enough to be totally usable in direct sunlight; you can read it comfortably on the couch, but don’t expect it to work as well by the pool. It’s also a smudge and fingerprint magnet.

The back of the

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***** HD 8 is composed of a sturdy, if mildly slippery, textured plastic. (Jeff Dunn for Engadget)

Again, though, the ***** HD 8 is competing in a different weight class than even an older iPad. The fact that the screen is relatively small makes the lower resolution at least tolerable. You can watch

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or read Kindle books and not think “man, this sucks” the whole time, especially if you bought the thing for well under $100.

There are other hardware compromises. The speakers aren’t all that loud and struggle to fully separate different parts of songs. They’re entirely on the left edge when you hold the tablet vertically, which always sounds odd. There’s an old USB-C 2.0 port for charging and a glacially slow 5W power adapter in the box.

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says it’ll take about five hours to fully charge the tablet with that; you can cut the wait in half if you bring your own 15W charger, though that’s still not fast. There’s no water resistance rating, so you’ll need to be careful if you ever want to read in the tub. Both the five-megapixel rear camera and 2MP front camera are brutal, washing out colors and blurring fine details even in good lighting. (As always, please report anyone using their tablet as a camera to the nearest authorities.)

It’s not all bad. While the ***** HD 8 only comes with 32GB or 64GB of storage built in — of which only 25GB or 54GB is usable, respectively — you can add up to 1TB of additional space with a microSD card. The 13-inch iPad Pro, which starts at $1,299, does not let you do that (I’m just saying!). The ***** HD 8 also has a headphone jack, which helps offset the mediocre speaker performance a little bit, plus there’s Bluetooth for wireless headphones. And one benefit of the shoddy display resolution is that it makes the ***** HD 8 less power-hungry:

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rates the tablet’s battery life at up to 13 hours. I got much more than that in our (relatively forgiving) battery test, but closer to 10 or 11 hours with more strenuous use. Either way, it’s good. Most people can safely expect it to survive a day of basic streaming and web browsing.

The ***** HD 8’s rear camera has technically jumped from 2MP to 5MP and now supports 1080p video recording, but it still doesn’t take photos you’d want to share. (Jeff Dunn for Engadget)

The new ***** HD 8 runs on a 2 GHz six-core processor (the MediaTek MT8169A). The base model includes 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM, while a $130 variant with twice the storage bumps the memory up to 4GB. I tested the former. The previous generation only came with 2GB of RAM — the pricier “***** HD 8 Plus” had 3GB — so this is a welcome upgrade.

That said, it’s not a huge boost. With the entry-level model, the gist is the same as it’s been with past ***** HD tablets: You can get by with simple video streaming, web browsing, reading and gaming, but there’ll be hitches and occasional crashes along the way, and it’ll never be powerful enough for serious work or reliable multitasking. The modern web is just too ad-heavy and grossly inefficient for a low-end chip like this, so you’ll inevitably have to deal with some choppiness when loading media-heavy sites like ESPN or The New York Times. Apps take just a bit longer to open than they would on a pricier tablet, and it’s not uncommon to get some lag when you jump back to the home screen.

Still, for the money, it’s all workable. It doesn’t take forever to open a Peacock stream or load an article on Engadget. The Mali-G52 GPU can even handle a decent level of gaming — casual card and match-three games run fine, and even more involved fare like PUBG Mobile and Diablo Immortal are totally playable, albeit with severely low-res textures. On the Geekbench 5 benchmark, the ***** HD 8 earned a single-core score of 193 and a multi-core score of 907. That is lightyears away from impressive, but given that the last-gen version struggled to even complete the tests without crashing, it’s still a step up.

One benefit of buying a cheap tablet: You usually get a headphone jack. (Jeff Dunn for Engadget)

Ultimately, it’s about managing expectations. You don’t buy a $100 tablet demanding a workhorse. When discounts bring that tablet’s price below $60, “not constantly annoying” becomes a compliment. If you can afford the model with 4GB of RAM, that should hold up better over time. Then again, a device like this makes the most sense when it’s as cheap as possible.

The ad-pocalypse that is ***** OS

The ***** HD 8 still runs on

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’s ***** OS, a fork of Android 11 that uses a custom app store and is designed to put

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’s own apps and services in the spotlight. (For the record, stock Android is up to version 15.) The generous read is that many of those apps are popular, so having them all front and center can be convenient. If you often stream movies on Prime Video, use

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Music with a Prime subscription or own a bunch of Kindle ebooks or Audible audiobooks, all of it is right there. You can set up different user profiles — also not available on an iPad — including child accounts that present a curated selection of ****-friendly websites and videos. A fairly robust set of parental controls let you monitor your child’s screen time within that. You can also call on Alexa and thus control various smart home devices hands-free, though

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has dropped support for the “Show Mode” that turned the tablet into a pseudo smart display.

You can install Alexa and all of those

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services on any tablet, though. Most of ***** OS’ actual changes *****, and they have for years now. The app store plays a big part in that. It covers many of the big streaming and social media players —

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, Hulu, TikTok, X, Max, Spotify, Disney+, etc. — but still omits all

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apps,

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, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Slack, tons of games and any browser besides

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’s ultra-basic Silk, among many others. The lack of

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******** the biggest *******;

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’s stock email and calendar apps are far less robust than Gmail and

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Calendar, while the bootleg

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“app” is just a web shortcut.

Left to right: one of ***** OS’ lockscreen ads, a snapshot of the less-than-useful “For You” page and an example of the AI-powered “Wallpaper Creator” tool. (Jeff Dunn for Engadget)

It’s true that you

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the

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Play Store and download most of what’s missing with a hacky workaround, but that’s not the experience

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is selling (and not one most people will opt to do). I can’t praise an OS that works best when you go behind its back. And as with many Android tablets, many of the apps that are supported look like blown-up phone apps more than experiences designed with a larger screen in mind.

Because this is a tech product launching in 2024, the ***** HD 8 also comes with a few AI-centric features, including an automated wallpaper creator, a writing assist tool and webpage summaries in the Silk Browser. All of these perform reasonably fast, but It’s hard to call them game-changers: The writing assist makes copy sound overly stilted, while the webpage summaries strip down most articles of their nuances (I beg you, just read the post.) The DALL-E-style wallpaper generator is neater, offering different styles and responding well to natural language requests, but I can’t get excited over AI art when there’s so much of the real thing out there.

More egregious are the ads. Oh, so many ads. Upon activating the tablet for the first time, I was greeted with a full-screen promo for BetMGM — because what budget-conscious tablet buyer isn’t looking to gamble their savings away — and have since been bombarded with lockscreen ads to buy Toshiba hard drives, State Farm insurance and SteelSeries gaming keyboards. Thankfully, you can remove these for an extra $15, either upfront or after purchase.

You can technically install the

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Play Store and get around some of ***** OS’ app limitations, but it’ll require a bit of legwork. (Jeff Dunn for Engadget)

But the spirit of nickel-and-diming you goes beyond that. The first app you see is “Shop

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.” The home screen itself is split into two sections: For You and Home. The former is a page filled with content suggestions, a significant chunk of which are either sponsored apps, links to movies on Prime Video and songs on

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Music or calls to subscribe to

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services like Kids+, Luna and Audible. Some of these are free; many others are paid. At one point, I **** you not, it presented me with an ad to buy a different ***** tablet.

The Home tab does have a traditional app grid, but above it is a “Discover” row that takes up the top 40 percent of the screen and delivers a similar range of not-so-personalized suggestions. As I write this, it includes a link to the Prime Video series Fallout, the sponsored app “Vita Mahjong for Seniors,” the Max app, links to two different thriller books from the author

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and a few other things I’ve shown zero interest in over my time using

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services.

It’s a jumbled, undignified mess. There’s a distinct lack of care to ***** OS, a pervading sense that it doesn’t so much have your best interest at heart it wants to needle cash-strapped customers into pumping more revenue into the

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machine. This just isn’t the case with iPadOS or even stock Android. Actually pay attention to what ***** OS is doing, and it becomes difficult to see ***** tablets as anything but subsidized ad platforms

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can seed in homes on the cheap. If you want a product that treats you with a little more respect, you have to pay for it.

The ***** HD 8 resting on top of a 13-inch iPad Air. (Jeff Dunn for Engadget)

Wrap-up

I get it, some of us just need to save some cash. And

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, fairly or not (i.e., not), can significantly undercut most other decent budget tablets on price. If cost is your number-one concern, you only want a tablet for casual media consumption and you can live with the unfiltered

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-ness of ***** OS, there’s still value to be had here. Little about the ***** HD 8 is good, but much of it is fine for the price, and when that price is as bananas-cheap

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, that’s probably enough. So it goes. Just make sure the slate is on ***** before you take the plunge. Otherwise, I’d consider the 10.1-inch ***** HD 10, which has the same software annoyances but a sharper, roomier display, more CPU power and a touch more battery life. Either way, here’s hoping ***** OS becomes less user-hostile one day.

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#cheap #tablet #hampered #outdated #software

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