Best Cheap Tablets 2024: Great value choices tested and ranked

The Honor Pad 9 is a great tablet made excellent thanks to its budget-friendly price. Coming in just under £300, the Honor Pad 9 also packs a bigger screen and more storage than the iPad, making it a worthy alternative to an Apple tablet. 

The tablet features a slender and lightweight build making it very portable, while the 12.1-inch IPS display is large and spacious with a 2.5K resolution, impressive brightness and a slick 120Hz refresh rate. This makes it ideal for streaming movies, browsing the web and reading on the go, and there’s stylus support for notetaking and sketching. 

There’s a 13-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front camera for joining video calls and snapping quick photos in a pinch. 

The performance isn’t too shabby either, with the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 and 8/12GB of RAM delivering smooth performance for easy multitasking and mobile gaming. It does fall short of the Apple iPad 10 and OnePlus Pad in terms of processing speed, but not to the extent you might expect given the price difference. 

The tablet runs Android 13 software with Honor’s overlay. We found this to be easy to use with fantastic app support, including the likes of YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive. The battery life is also solid, allowing us to get through a full working day or a few movies on a single charge, though that number drops to around 6 hours when gaming. 

If you’re looking for an impressive all-rounder at a budget price, the Honor Pad 9 is the tablet for you.

Reviewer: Lloyd Coombes
Full review: Honor Pad 9 review

The iPad 10 is the best value tablet in Apple’s current line-up, making it an easy choice for anyone searching for an iPad on a budget. 

The standard iPad underwent a major redesign with the launch of the iPad 10, which brought the tablet more in line with the rest of the tablets in Apple’s line-up visually. The iPad 10 is lighter than the iPad 9 and its flat back and sides and slimmer bezels draw a closer resemblance to the iPad Air. Apple has also finally dropped the home button on the iPad, making it appear significantly more modern. 

The display is sharp and colour, though it does lack some of the more advanced tech found on the Air. There’s no anti-reflective coating or P3 colour gamut coverage, but considering the lower price, this is somewhat to be expected and by no means makes it a bad screen. 

The selfie camera is sharp and the image quality far surpasses the webcams on Apple’s MacBook line. It’s also been repositioned to the longer edge of the tablet, making it ideal for joining FaceTime calls in landscape mode as opposed to portrait. 

Apple’s A14 Bionic chip offers stellar performance – especially compared to competing budget tablets. Apps and games run smoothly, though it is worth noting that upgrading the storage beyond 64GB isn’t cheap and cellular data doesn’t come included in the tablet’s base price. 

The iPad 10’s 10-hour battery life is comparable to the rest of Apple’s iPad range, though the switch to USB-C is notably more convenient than the lighting port on previous iPads. The upgraded Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil accessory support is also certainly appreciated.

Reviewer: Max Parker
Full Review: Apple iPad 10 review

Teclast might not be a household name in the tech market, but the plucky Teclast T40S manages to deliver a solid Android tablet experience at just £170, and it’s often found cheaper over at Amazon too, further solidifying its value for money. 

The star of the show is processing power as, despite its cheap price point, it can compete with more established tablets like the Honor Pad X9 and Oppo Pad Air in terms of performance. There’s also a surprising 8GB of RAM on offer to aid multitasking and help chew through ad-laden websites, with an additional 8GB of your 128GB storage also able to be allocated to RAM when performing particularly power-intensive tasks.

That powers a moderately sized 10.4-inch display that we found perfectly usable indoors, though with a maximum brightness of just 350 nits, it’s not a tablet suited to outdoor scrolling. 

There are a few oddities about the tablet – it runs a stripped-back version of Android 12 with bigger buttons and boasts fairly random features like FM Radio support – and it’s not exactly the best-looking tablet around, but for the price, you’ll be hard pressed to find something more capable. 

Reviewer: Josh Brown
Full review: Teclast T40S review

The OnePlus Pad Go is the little brother to the company’s full-fat OnePlus Pad, offering a slightly more budget-friendly tablet experience. However, the Pad Go has a trick up its sleeve; LTE connectivity as standard.

That means you no longer need to pay extra for a cellular tablet (Apple, we’re looking at you!), allowing you to pop a SIM card into the included SIM tray and use the tablet away from your home Wi-Fi. It’s a real boon for those who work and play on the go, even if you still have to pay for the data contract yourself.

Elsewhere, the OnePlus Pad Go remains a tempting budget tablet with a large 11.3-inch, high-res screen that’s ideal for watching movies and playing games, especially when paired with the smooth 90Hz refresh rate. The screen is very reflective, however, which can make it awkward to use in brighter environments when paired with a fairly average 400 nits screen brightness.

It’s powered by the Helio G99 and a healthy dose of 8GB of RAM, a combo that won’t exactly win awards for processing power any time soon, but it still provides a largely smooth experience. There is the occasional bit of lag, but nothing that’ll put a real dampener on your experience, especially when the low-powered chipset translates to long battery life and even longer standby times of up to a month.

Reviewer: Lewis Painter
Full review: OnePlus Pad Go review

The Lenovo Tab M10 Plus (3rd Gen) is a budget tablet with a premium look and feel, sporting an aluminium unibody with a stone-textured strip along one side of the rear to further elevate its design status. It really is a good-looking tablet, complete with a thickness of just 7.5mm and rounded edges that sit comfortably in the palm. 

The 10.61-inch 2000 x 1200 display sports a 16:10 aspect ratio that keeps black bars to a minimum when watching video content from the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, and when coupled with Dolby Atmos-enabled speakers, the watching experience is quite pleasant. The 400nits of brightness isn’t enough for HDR playback, but it’s just about enough for use outdoors. 

It’s just a shame that the MediaTek MT6769V chipset isn’t a little more powerful, with our reviewer noting unpredictable stuttering that would occasionally plague the tablet, and it wasn’t quite enough to run demanding 3D gaming titles either.

It does have a compatible stylus accessory that could make it a tempting option for note-taking students, though it’ll set you back an additional £45. 

Reviewer: Josh Brown
Full review: Lenovo Tab M10 Plus (3rd Gen) review

The Amazon Fire Max 11 is the latest in a long line of Amazon Fire-branded tablets from the retail giant, though this one looks and feels different. 

Sporting a more mature design that’s more than a little bit reminiscent of Apple’s iPad Air, complete with rounded edges and a slightly raised single camera bump on the rear, the tablet feels much more premium than its price tag suggests it should.

The 11-inch 2000 x 1200 IPS LCD display might not boast OLED tech of more premium tablets, but what it does have is a fully laminated screen. It might not sound like much, but it means there’s no air gap between the front glass and LCD panel like Apple’s cheaper iPads, removing that cheap hollow feeling when you tap and swipe on the display. 

The big display is designed for productivity according to Amazon, and even sells dedicated stylus and keyboard case accessories for the tablet separately, further separating itself from the rest of the budget Fire collection. 

But for all Amazon’s efforts to position it as a productivity workhorse, the lack of pro-level apps on Amazon’s limited Fire OS and Appstore stop it from achieving its aim. Even the built-in word processing app doesn’t fit the tablet’s display properly.

That’s a real shame too, as the chipset within easily beats just about everything else in our charts, and by quite a way too. Still, it does mean it’s great for gaming and general day-to-day use, as long as the apps and games you enjoy are available on the Fire OS platform. 

Battery life is also solid with exceptional standby times that allow it to last over a week when not in use, though charging can be slow with only a 9W charging brick in the box. 

Reviewer: Lewis Painter
Full review: Amazon Fire Max 11 review

If portability is one of the key factors in your buying decision, the Oppo Pad Air should be of serious consideration. At 440g and 6.9mm thick, the 10.36-inch tablet is lighter than Apple’s iPad 10 and even the lightweight iPad Air while still delivering that large-screen experience.

It’s not just lightweight either; the gunmetal aluminium shell is smooth and sleek, helping the tablet feel more premium than it actually is, and it comes with handy features like a microSD card slot to expand the 128GB of storage on offer.

The 10.36-inch IPS LCD is sufficiently sharp at 2000 x 1200 and is perfectly serviceable for scrolling through websites and watching movies on Netflix, though with just 360 nits of brightness, it’s not the best in bright outdoor conditions.

It’s not a powerhouse of processing power either, with the Snapdragon 680 delivering fine – but not rapid – everyday performance, though it can’t quite handle high-end AAA games so gamers may want to look elsewhere. Even certain worlds in Roblox would slow the Pad right down.

It’ll last around 15 hours on a charge with decent standby times and although it takes over two hours to charge, that’s in line with the iPad 10 and Xiaomi Pad 5.

All this boils down to a lightweight, portable tablet that’s great for scrolling through TikTok, browsing the web and watching movies on Netflix, though it’ll probably not suffice for the majority of gamers.

Reviewer: Josh Brown
Full review: Oppo Pad Air review