Anyone knows much about tablet? Please recommend me an affordable one.

[Mr. Detective]

Hello guys,

I am planning to buy a tablet to put in my car. I don't think I will be using it a lot. I just want to use it like an entertainment device when I wait for something, or if I happen to drive someone around. Also, the navigation system on my Ford Fusion is atrocious so I want to run Waze on it. Here's a list of what apps I want to run:

• Waze for navigation. Not sure how it would track my location or find routes. It's not like a phone which I can just turn on mobile data. How would this work?
• Emulators, like PPSSPP, GBA, PS1, or Snes. I am going to buy a controller to connect to the tablet as well, probably by Bluetooth. I want the games to look good and play smooth. Modern games on Google Play, in case I want to play them, should work fine as well.
• Movies (maybe). I would like at least decent screen and speakers.

Like I said, I might not use it very often, so I want to look for something not too expensive, maybe below 150 or lower if possible. I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and it's about 4 years old. If the screen resolution and quality and specs can at least be as good as my phone, it's probably good enough. I don't know much, or anything about tablets. I think Amazon has some old Samsung and ASUS tablets for about $150 or so, but I am wondering if there's any better choice.

So if you know a good one, please recommend it to me.
Thank you.

 

[Poryg]

ASUS is cheap, but their laptops convince me that the quality of their goods is on another level (ironically). However, if you don't intend to use it too much, it may be enough.
My piece of experience is, for an android device you need cpu more than RAM. From Android 5.1 onwards the system keeps the RAM clean and I hardly ever go over 1 GB RAM (even when I'm playing games and having like 8 different apps opened - so far the highest RAM I've ever gotten to was 1.3 when I was playing Asphalt 8).
I'd recommend Huawei tablets, these are performance-wise cheap and veeeeery sturdy (mine has gone through accidental, but quite rough treatment and still only few scratches on the screen and body), however not sure if you find them affordable enough.
Asus are cheap, but low quality (although if you're going to be a soft-core user, this should be fine... Just don't be mad if it breaks). Lenovo are overpriced. Alcatel too, but these are beginner-friendly.

 

[Mr. Detective]

Never heard of Huawei before, but after searching for them on Amazon, the prices aren't exactly cheap, either. And based on your description of its performance, probably not worth the price. ASUS seems okay, I guess. Price wise, about $120, not too bad. Their stuff has a reputation for overheating, though. I found some Lenovo that seemed quite cheap, too. Not sure how well they work.

Is there any specific link that you can drop here?

 

[Poryg]

As I said, Huawei are cheap performance wise, not affordability wise my tablet is a beast, but it has too much performance for me, I can't ever use an octa-core ( 4x2 and 4x1.5 GHz)
I shop in Czech markets, so I can't send any links. My first tablet was Visionbook 7Q, less than a hundred bucks (at that time it was like 60 bucks or something), but it is prone to overheating and prone to defects too due to cheap construction.

 

[Dalph]

Get a Nvidia Shield K1, it's actually one of the best Android tablets around, has plenty of power to play almost anything and is very affordable too (should cost around $200 or less). Too bad nowdays it's not easy to find it anymore because Nvidia stopped producing it. If you can find it though I can assure you that it's really a steal at that price!

The K1 has a quad-core cpu, 2GB of ram, Android 7.0 Nougat, 16GB of internal memory and microSD card slot up to 128GB!

 

[Mr. Detective]

I saw some on Ebay around 130-160 bucks. I'm kinda iffy about buying stuff on Ebay, lol. Not bad, I guess. But it's only 8 inches, slightly bigger than my Note 3, which is about 5.7 inches. I kinda want to look for something bigger, if possible.

One more thing is: I see a lot of tablets with resolution of 1280x800. So this is the most popular resolution for tablets? Even my phone has 1920x1080 resolution. I'm not sure if I should just bite the bullet and get a Samsung Tab A...

 

[Mr. Detective]

Hey guys... Is it illegal to have a tablet running in a car while driving?

Like I said, I'm probably going to use it mostly for GPS, but I would like to run games and movies on it as well. Question is, my mother said that it's illegal in CA to have a tablet running anything besides navigation while driving. So if I play a movie for my passengers, or if they play games while I am driving, would I be pulled over?

I'm going to put it on the dashboard.