Samsung Galaxy Tab B7 Review: A great cheap tablet

I’m here to tell you that cheap pills are good. I’m not here to tell you that they are the future of computing or will replace your laptop to get the job done. But I will tell you that they are excellent devices of entertainment.

The best way to experience a cheap tablet is to simply install the apps you use for entertainment and relaxation: Kindle, Hulu, Prime Video, HBO Max, Pocket, whatever you like. Twitter, Slack, The New York Times An app, email or anything that will take you away from leisure time and drag you to work or into a scary doomscroll. This is the tablet you buy to watch videos and read things, not to try to replace your laptop.

I have been testing Samsung’s Galaxy Tab A7 for the last few months and found that it is an excellent example of a cheap tablet. At 9,229.99 (and often available for less), it’s cheaper than the entry-level iPad, but it also works for watching videos and reading books and articles. I’m not the one to go for recommending Android tablets – the iPad objective is better in almost every scenario – but the Tab Tab A7 is surprisingly capable and reasonably priced for its third device status.

The bar for the tablet that is only intended as a personal entertainment device is really very low. It needs a sleek screen with enough resolution so you don’t see individual pixels at comfortable distances, a speaker that doesn’t make a muffled or squeaky sound, and a battery life that will let you go through a few movies between charges after winning potential. ‘T don’t plug this thing in whenever you use it. It should also be thin and relatively light so you can hold it for a long time without getting tired.

T A B A7 exceeds all those metrics. The 10.4-inch 1080p screen is vibrant and colorful, the battery easily goes for 10 hours or more of video, and the quad-speaker system looks terrific. It’s surprisingly thin, with a metal chassis that looks stiffer and nicer than the plastic-clad Amazon Fire tablets. There’s just enough flooring around the screen so I can handle it firmly without having to worry about mistaken touch, and it’s light enough so I can even hold it in one hand for reading. It also has a 3.5mm headphone jack when you don’t want to disturb anyone else while watching episode 7 Boys In a row.

It may not be surprising where the Tab B7 comes short, but none of its flaws prevent it from becoming a good entertainment device. Its low-midrange Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor and 3GB of RAM make it one of the fastest or Snapiest devices around – but it doesn’t matter when you’re using your favorite video or ebook app. Its camera sucks, but on the other hand, if you use it for a zoom call, it’s less annoying than the iPad, thanks to the correct placement of the front camera.

Android doesn’t have nearly as much width or depth of apps as the iPad, but it does have all the major streaming video services (save for Apple Pull TV Plus) and all of the book-reading apps you need. The base model Dell has only 32GB of storage, but it supports microSD card expansion, so it’s easy to add more. Lastly, the Tab Tab A7 lacks any kind of fingerprint scanner or biometrics login gin, but I use it only at home and there is no sensitive or functional data on it, so I’m comfortable being comfortable disabling secure screen lock . To see the binge celebration.

Samsung isn’t pushing any productivity features here: it doesn’t come with a stylus, no keyboard case for it, and it doesn’t have Samsung’s Dex desktop software software mode. It doesn’t even have Samsung’s Dumbar-Average-Average Bixby voice support. (Google Assistant is available and works just like any other device.) Instead of spending time and resources developing features that most people don’t use, Samsung focused on the things here: putting the best speakers and maybe the ones you can find. Best performance. In a tablet at this price point.

And really, this is all you wanted from a tablet like this. It needs to look good, it needs to sound good, and it needs to have apps with the content you want. T AB A7 checks all those boxes and no more.

This is the best anti-doomscrolling gadget you can get this year.

Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge