‘Tis the season for cheapie tablets. They’re everywhere, and they cost $89, $79, even $59. About the only place I haven’t seen one is at a convenience store. But you don’t want them. They’re always underpowered and cheaply built, so they’ll be frustratingly slow to use and the hardware is likely to start failing after a year or so.
But this weekend I saw a budget tablet that hits all of the minimums, for $99, at an unlikely place: Aldi. Yes, the discount grocery store. It’s called the Medion Lifetab.Let’s talk minimums. At minimum, you want a 1024×600 screen, 1 GB of RAM, at least a 1 GHz dual-core processor, and 8 GB of storage. For security reasons, you want nothing older than Android 4.1.2. And if it has an SD card slot, that would be better.
Aldi meets all those minimums and exceeds a couple of them by a little. The CPU is 1.4 GHz (likely a Mediatek or Rockchip, but serviceable) and it ships with Android 4.2.
Not only that, it has a two-year warranty. That inspires some confidence it won’t break in 13 months.
Likely downsides: It’s unlikely to get much in the way of updates, and you can probably forget about hacking it and loading new versions of Android yourself. There’s no reason it wouldn’t be hackable, but it’s generally the larger market tablets that attract that kind of developer support. Assume it’s stuck at Android 4.2.2 or so, and that you won’t be upgrading it.
It’s an entry-level tablet in every regard, but unlike every other tablet I’ve seen at that price, it’s one I would actually consider buying and giving as a gift.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I think if you’re going to talk street, you need to go all the way. “A $99 Tablet that DON’T stank” – see, your credibility just increased.
*smiles*
Merry Christmas, by the way.
Hmm. I guess I do have all the credibility of Phil Hartmann’s character on News Radio when he was the spokesman for Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor.
And maybe that’s not such a bad thing?
Merry Christmas to you too!