Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 review: a great inexpensive tablet

I’m here to tell you that cheap tablets are good. I’m not here to tell you that they are the future of computing or that they will replace your laptop for work. But I will tell you that these are great entertainment devices.

The best way to find a cheap tablet is to simply install the apps you use for entertainment and relaxation: Kindle, Hulu, Prime Video, HBO Max, Pocket, whatever vice you want. Don’t install or configure things like Twitter, Slack, The New York Times app, email, or whatever will rob you of your free time and drag you into work or the dreaded doomscroll. It’s a tablet you buy for watching videos and reading stuff, not trying to replace your laptop.

I’ve tested Samsung’s Galaxy Tab A7 over the past few months and found it to be a great example of a cheap tablet. At $ 229.99 (and often available at a lower price), it’s much more affordable than an entry-level iPad, but it works equally well for watching videos and reading books and articles. I’m not one to recommend Android tablets – an iPad is objectively better in almost every scenario – but the Tab A7 is surprisingly competent and decently priced for its tertiary status.

The bar for a tablet intended to be just a personal entertainment device is actually quite low. It needs an attractive display with enough resolution that you can’t see individual pixels at a comfortable distance, speakers that aren’t muffled or sounding crackling, and battery life that will keep you going. to browse a few movies between charges since you probably won. Don’t plug this thing in after every use. It should also be thin and relatively light so that you can hold it for long periods of time without tiring yourself out.

Tab A7 exceeds all of these measures. The 10.4-inch 1080p display is vibrant and colorful, the battery runs smoothly for 10 or more hours of video, and the four-speaker system sounds great. It’s surprisingly thin, with a more rigid and nicer metal chassis than plastic-coated Amazon Fire tablets. There’s just enough bezel around the screen that I can comfortably handle it without worrying about stray keys, and it’s light enough that I can even hold it in one hand to read. It even has a 3.5mm headphone jack so it doesn’t disturb someone else while watching the seventh episode of. The boys in a row.

Where the Tab A7 is short won’t come as a surprise, but none of its flaws prevent it from being a good entertainment device. Its low-to-mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor and 3GB of RAM make it far from the fastest or most eye-catching device on the market – but that doesn’t matter when using the app. video or ebook of your choice. Its cameras suck, but on the other hand, if you’re using it for a Zoom call, it’s a lot less annoying than an iPad, thanks to the correct placement of the front camera.

Android doesn’t have as many apps as the iPad, but it does have all the major video streaming services (except Apple TV Plus) and all the book reading apps you could want. There’s only 32GB of storage in the base model, but it supports microSD card expansion, so it’s easy to add more. Finally, the Tab A7 doesn’t have any sort of fingerprint scanner or biometric login, but since I just use it at home and don’t have any sensitive or business data on it, I’m in Comfortable disabling the secure screen lock for easy access. to watch in frenzy.

Samsung doesn’t offer any productivity features here: it doesn’t come with a stylus, there’s no keyboard case available, and it doesn’t have Samsung’s DeX desktop software mode. It doesn’t even have Samsung’s dumber-than-average Bixby voice assistant. (The Google Assistant is available and works just like any other device.) Instead of spending time and resources developing features that most people won’t use, Samsung has focused on what matters here: put the best speakers and maybe the best screen you can get in a tablet at this price.

And really, that’s all you could want from a tablet like this. It should look good, sound good, and have the apps with the content you want. The A7 tab ticks all these boxes and no more.

It’s the best anti-doomscrolling gadget you can get this year.

Photograph by Dan Seifert / The Verge