While the S11 and S11 Ultra are pretty close specs-wise, I suggest that you go for the Ultra if you can. It’s big, and sometimes unwieldy to carry around, but that giant screen is glorious for entertainment, and working in split-screen mode feels like you’re on a laptop. While I do like OnePlus’s OxygenOS (RIP) better, Samsung’s Dex tablet UI is pretty good, turning your tablet into more of a traditional desktop-like user interface, with windowed apps and a dock. The tablet supports an external monitor too, so you can have dual-screen multitasking. The best feature, though, is the workspaces: you set up four different desktops however you like, then quickly cycle between them depending on the workflow at hand. If you do plan to work on your Ultra, get Samsung’s Book Cover Keyboard Slim, a keyboard cover that makes it feel more like a 2-in-1 detachable laptop than a tablet.
The Best Budget Android Tablet
-
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
-
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
-
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
TCL’s Tab A1 Plus is a budget tablet that doesn’t feel low-rent. The star here is the very nice 12.2-inch, 2400 x 1600 pixel LCD panel. It’s not an OLED, but it’s sharp, colorful, and bright, and thanks to the 120-Hz screen refresh rate, everything you do feels nice and smooth. The size is nice, too: The A1 Plus has a 3:2 aspect ratio, which makes it feel not so big that it’s hard to hold but not so small that you feel cramped working in split-screen mode. The 2.4K resolution at this size works out to a pixel density of 236 ppi. For comparison, the base model iPad screen is 2360 × 1640 pixels at 264 ppi. Side by side, the two are very close in terms of resolution.
A tablet this cheap—which rivals the iPad in screen size and quality, and currently costs almost $200 less—has some downsides, the biggest being the processor, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 chip dating back to 2023. This isn’t flagship-level performance, but it’s plenty fast enough for ordinary tasks, like browsing the web with a dozen tabs open, listening to music, and multitasking—all the typical tablet workloads. I had no trouble playing back 4K video, nor did it falter when live-streaming baseball games (provided the bandwidth was sufficient). Where this tablet falls apart is if you want to game. It’s capable of what I would call casual gaming, but if you really want a tablet for gaming, this is not it. Performance isn’t top tier, but it’s adequate for most people. If you’re looking for a budget Android tablet, this is currently the best I’ve tested.
The Best Hybrid Note-Taking Tablet
-
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
-
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
-
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
-
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
TCL’s Note A1 Nxtpaper tablet straddles between an E Ink digital notebook and an Android tablet. It tries to be the best of both worlds and succeeds to an admirable degree. The matte screen has many of the advantages of an E Ink screen, but it’s also a 1440 x 2200-pixel LCD panel with a 120-Hz refresh rate, so it’ll happily play back video when you’re done using it as an e-reader or note-taking device. The MediaTek G100 processor is par for the course at this price point. It gets paired with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, which collectively is enough performance to run all the apps I tested and power some of the AI-driven features that TCL is pushing with this device, including automated meeting summaries, audio-to-text transcription, and handwriting-to-text conversion (also, seldom noted, it can convert complex equations from handwritten to typed).
