5 Best Android Tablets in 2026: Samsung, TCL, Amazon, and More

IPad? Never heard of it.

I have been using Android tablets pretty much since the first one came out, and I’ve never felt the need for anything made by any fruit companies. Android tablets make great “nice to have” entertainment centers, or they can be complete lightweight laptop replacements for travel.

Whatever your use case, I’ve tested just about all the Android tablets out there, and these are the best, depending on what you need them for. If you want to see how these stack up next to those iPad things, check out our guide to all the tablets on the market.

Be sure to check out our other buying guides, including the Best Amazon Fire Tablets, Best iPad, and Best iPad Accessories.

Updated August 2026: I’ve removed the now discontinued (in the US) OnePlus Pad 3 and changed the top pick to the Galaxy Tab S10 FE. I’ve also added two new tablets from TCL, and removed the discontinued Google Pixel Tablet.

Courtesy of Samsung

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Samsung

Galaxy Tab S10 FE

$550 $450 (18% off)

Amazon

$550 $450 (18% off)

Samsung

A consequence of OnePlus’ exit from the North American and European markets is that we will likely never see the release of its Pad 4, the follow-up to our previous pick for the best Android tablet, the OnePlus Pad 3. While you could buy the international version and get it shipped to you, most people should look toward the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 FE instead, which does everything you need and comes with a US warranty. I prefer the FE model with its 10.9-inch display, which is a good viewing size for on the couch, in bed, or on the move. There is also the Galaxy Tab S10 FE+ if you prefer a larger 13.1-inch display, but it is heavier.

The Tab S10 FE weighs just over a pound (17.5 ounces), and it’s comfortable to hold or prop up in bed with one hand. The 90-Hz refresh rate isn’t the fastest among tablets in this guide, but it’s plenty smooth for all but the most demanding games. Videos look crisp and sharp, and the 2304 x 1440-pixel LCD screen is bright enough for viewing outdoors in sunlight.

Inside, you get Samsung’s Exynos 1580 midrange mobile processor paired with 8 GB or 12 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage that can be expanded by adding a microSD card. The 8,000-mAh battery will get you about 20 hours of mixed use on a single charge, and the 45-watt charger will get you back to 100 percent in just over an hour and a half.

Samsung includes a stylus in the box with the Tab S10 FE, and it’s handy for writing notes, but it’s pretty basic. If you want to draw, there are better tablet options below.

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11 and Tab S11 Ultra are the Android world’s answer to the iPad Pro. They’ve got the flagship specs, and at a mere 0.20 inches thick (5.1 mm), the Ultra matches the look as well. They are slightly heavier than their iPad Pro counterparts, but not enough that I actually notice the difference. Unlike the prior generation Tab S10 series, there’s no middle-of-the-pack “Plus” model anymore. You have the 11-inch Tab S11 and the biggie, the 14.6-inch Tab S11 Ultra. Both run Android 16 out of the box, have 120-Hz AMOLED displays, and can hit a peak brightness of 1,600 nits. Samsung uses a MediaTek processor, the Dimensity 9400+, which is closely matched to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite. Both models get 12 GB of RAM (if you go for the 1-terabyte Ultra model, the RAM goes up to 16 GB). Storage is expandable via microSD.

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.

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.

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).

Surprisingly for a $600 tablet, the Note A1 includes a very nice reversible pen (you can erase with the top) and a keyboard. The unnecessarily complex keyboard case is something only its mother really loves (it’s heavy and weirdly designed), but it does a good job of protecting the tablet and the keyboard is nice to type on (and it’s included in the price, which is frankly shocking).

The custom UI skews heavily toward note-taking as well as writing and drawing. The home view is a list of notes, with space at the top of the screen allocated for a short to-do list on the right and the Inspiration Space, which is kind of a free-form clipboard area where you can store things you want to highlight (pretty much anything, which is very useful). Click on a note with the pen, and it will open in edit mode with a configuration toolbar shown across the top. Here you can set up pen type, color, line thicknesses, and all the other tools you’d want to use to write or draw. I found the editing interface just about perfect in the sense that it balances keeping it simple but still gives you access to the controls you actually need.

What I was less thrilled with is the file management system that TCL has created. It works, but there are confusing shortcomings. Like, I could not find a way to open a note in reading mode and then switch to editing from within the note. Despite these quirks, the Note A1 Nxtpaper is a really great note-taking device that can also be a regular tablet on the occasions you need it.

Courtesy of Best Buy

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Amazon

Fire HD 10

$155

Amazon

Amazon’s Fire tablets are the cheapest of the cheap. More charitably, you might call them ultra-affordable tablets. They are so cheap—around $85 for the Fire HD 10 during one of Amazon’s many sales events— they seem almost like a scam, but Fire tablets are also completely functional, reasonably capable devices. (I’ve even paired it with a keyboard to work from the beach, although this has become increasingly difficult.)

Amazon sells two models, the aforementioned Fire HD 10 and the smaller Fire HD 8 (see honorable mentions). You’ll also find variants made for kids as well as a Harry Potter-edition for the Fire HD 10, but the standard Fire HD 10 is the one to get, as it’s the most powerful. The current model dates from 2023, which means it likely will get some kind of update soon, but we don’t expect anything more than a processor and RAM upgrade. The current Octa-core processor is plenty fast for everyday tasks like web browsing and watching movies, and the 3 GB of RAM helps in browsing the web with many tabs. The Fire HD 10 also has a full HD (1080p) screen, but it’s pretty lackluster by today’s standards.

The Fire HD 10 comes with 32 GB of internal storage, with a microSD slot on both, so you can add up to 1 TB if you need more space. (A 64 GB version is currently unavailable through Amazon, but you may find it from a reseller.) Amazon will serve up advertisements on the lock screen. To get rid of that, you’ll need to spend $15 to unlock it (via your account settings).

The big downside to the Fire tablets is the Amazon version of Android. It’s outdated and slow, with a custom app store that doesn’t support many apps (for example, the entire suite of Google Workspace apps won’t be available—not even the browser-based versions). You might be able to side-load the Google Play Store (see our guide), but sadly, this hasn’t worked reliably for me with the latest models—no more remote work from the beach for me. Still, for less than $100 on sale, the Fire HD 10 is crazy cheap and does work for casual entertainment and web browsing.

There are a lot of Android tablets for sale, so if none of the above seem quite right for your needs, these are also worth considering.