If you’re shopping for a new tablet, there are so many on the market that it can be hard to know which one to choose. A few things to consider include:
- Your budget
- Portability
- Battery life
- Primary usage
To help you find a tablet that fits your needs, here are six of the most popular models on the market and the features that make them stand out.
Best Overall
The 9.7-inch iPad Pro has Apple’s fastest-ever mobile processor and new True Tone display, easily making it the best tablet on the market at this time. This tablet uses sensors to detect the light in any room it’s in to adjust the colour temperature of the display to match the available light. This makes the screen look more like paper.
The screen resolution is 2048 x 1536 and the device uses an A9X processor, which is the fastest mobile processor available on an iOS device. The iPad Pro features four speakers for the best possible sound and is compatible with the Pencil. It also has a special connector to keyboards so you don’t have to rely on a Bluetooth connection to type without the on-screen keyboard.
Apple also included the same rear-facing 12MP camera as the iPhone 6S, so you can take better pictures on your tablet. The battery life averages 9 to 10 hours and the iPad Pro comes with 128 MB of storage.
Best Tablet Under $75
If you don’t have a lot to pay for a tablet, the Amazon Fire is your best bet. One big enticement for buying an Amazon tablet is its strong connection to Amazon services, which means access to 38 million songs, books, apps, games and more.
The seven-inch, 1024 x 600 screen resolution could be a better quality but the Fire does make watching TV shows and movies on Amazon Instant Video easy to watch. You also have access to other video services such as Netflix and Hulu.
The Amazon Fire is 7.5-inches by 4.5-inches by 0.4-inches in size and weighs only 11 ounces, making it highly portable. It has a seven-hour batter life, so it’s easy to keep up with e-mail and social media on-the-go.
Although there’s only 8GB to 16GB of storage, you can store unlimited Amazon content for free in the Cloud and easily add a micro SD card for up to 128GB of additional storage.
Best 2-in-1
If you need a device that does double duty as a tablet and a laptop, you’ll want to have a look at the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S. It’s slim; only .25-inches thick with a 12-inch screen and comes with a full-sized detachable keyboard that easily snaps into place so you can answer e-mails and catch up on work after office hours.
The Galaxy TabPro S has an estimated battery life of 10.5 hours, runs on Windows 10, has an Intel Core m3 processor, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. You can also play games on this tablet by streaming Xbox One games to the tablet through the Windows 10 Xbox app.
Best for Portability
Outside of the iPad Pro line, the iPad mini 4 is arguably the best tablet, making it one of the best eight-inch tablets on the market. It weighs less than a pound, uses an A8 processor that’s only a bit slower than the iPad Air’s A8X chip and is capable of all the same software features as the larger tablet; side-by-side multi-tasking is one example. The iPad mini 4 also has the same 8MP rear-facing camera as the Air 2.
The smaller screen may not be for everyone and it’s more expensive than other small tablets on this list, but iOS has a much better selection of tablet apps than Android. The iPad mini 4 comes in 16GB, 64GB and 128GB and you have a choice of three colours: gold, silver and space gray.
Best for Designers
The Surface Pro4 is a full Windows laptop in a tablet. It includes the Surface Pen and has the ability to run full Windows 10 apps like Photoshop, perfect for people who want a tablet for doing serious design work. This 2-in-1 is a tablet first and a laptop second but you can get Intel Core m3, i5 or i7 processors, Intel HD or Iris graphics, up to 16 GB of Ram and up to 512GB of storage.
The Surface Pro 4 includes an adjustable easel-like kickstand that can be set at almost any angle; great for the artist. The screen has a higher contrast ratio than most other tablets and much lower glare, so you don’t have to worry about the lighting in a room making it hard to draw.
Best for Battery Life
The Lenova Yoga Tab 3 is an eight-inch Android tablet with a giant battery that can last up to 20 hours on one charge, great for binge-watching Star Wars movies. It isn’t the fastest tablet on the market and the screen has the same resolution as the Amazon Fire. The Yoga Tab 3’s quad-core processor could be faster and it only has one 8MP cameral that rotates from front to back.
This tablet has a built-in kickstand so you don’t need a case to prop it on a table and it includes two front-facing speakers for a better sound experience than other tablets of the same size and price.