5 Best Android Tablets in 2026: One Plus, Lenovo, and Pixel Compared | WIRED
Overview
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 i Pad things, check out our guide to all the tablets on the market.
Details
Be sure to check out our other buying guides, including the Best Amazon Fire Tablets, Best i Pad, and Best i Pad Accessories.
The Luxury Android Tablet: Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra
The Best De-Googled Android Tablet: Google Pixel with Graphene OS
The best overall Android tablet I've tried in the One Plus Pad 3. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip offers great performance, with plenty of power for gaming, photo editing, and watching 4K video. The 13.2-inch LCD screen offers an excellent 3.4K resolution with a 144-Hz refresh rate (again great for gaming), and 12-bit color. Would I like to see an OLED screen? Sure, but no tablet at this price has one, not even the i Pad Air. The Pad 3's screen is one of the nicer LCD panels I've tested, and easy to read even in bright sunlight. One of the nice things about the LCD rather than OLED screen is that the Pad 3 has excellent battery life. I've watched back-to-back movies on plane flights and barely dipped below the halfway mark, and thanks to the 80-watt fast-charging point, you can recharge to 50 percent in under half an hour, with a full recharge taking about 1.5 hours. I also love that it loses hardly any power in standby mode. One Plus rates it to 70 days of standby mode, but that's with the Wi Fi off. In the real world, I can leave it lying around for a week, and it'll still have 70 percent charge.
Part of the reason I think the Pad 3 is the best tablet for most people is that not only is it great for consuming content (it's how I watch the majority of the baseball games I watch), it's possible to get work done on it as well. One Plus’ Oxygen OS software is the best multi-tasking UI for Android tablets. I even prefer it to Apple's i Pad OS thanks to its Open Canvas system. Using Open Canvas, you can place three apps side by side, which is admittedly cramped, but still useful, or you can do what I do and use apps two side by side and expand a third at the bottom and scroll down to get to it. For me, that means a text editor at the bottom, which I effectively use in full screen, and then I can scroll up to get to my web browser and secondary app, which live side-by-side. It's a great way to work; the only drawback is the One Plus Pad keyboard, which I don't love.
Samsung's Galaxy Tab S11 and Tab S11 Ultra are the i Pad Pro of the Android world. They've got the flagship specs, and at a mere 0.20 inches thick (5.1 mm), the Ultra matches the look at well. They are slightly heavier than an i Pad Pro, but not enough that I actually notice the difference. Unlike the prior generation Tab S10 series, there's no middle “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 Media Tek processor, the Dimensity 9400+, which is closely matched to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite in the One Plus Pad. 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 micro SD.
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 One Plus's Oxygen OS better, Samsung's Dex tablet UI is pretty good, making your tablet into more of a traditional desktop-like user interface, with windowed apps and a dock. There's good support for connecting to an external monitor too, which means you can have dual-screen multitasking and eat your tablet too. The best feature, though, is the workspaces, which allow you to create four desktops set up however you like, and then you can quickly cycle between them. 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.
Lenovo's Idea Tab Pro can often be had on sale for around $300, which is about as cheap as Android tablets get. To get any cheaper, you'll have to do with an Amazon Fire HD tablet (see below), which is a serious step down in performance. The Idea Tab Pro has a Media Tek Dimensity 8300 chip, which has proved surprisingly powerful in my testing. It had no trouble playing 4K video or editing some rather large RAW files (using Photoshop Express). The bright LCD screen has 3K resolution spread across a 12.7-inch panel. The speakers sound great, and there's an included stylus to jot down notes or doodle.
Where the Lenovo starts to show its price is in the software. Lenovo shipped with Android 14, updated to 15, but 16 will be the last full update (security updates will continue). Also annoying is the crapware that comes pre-installed. With every tab I try, I spend the first 20 minutes uninstalling all the unwanted apps like Block Puzzle Adventure, Tik Tok, Cat Tile, and other garbage. It's a bit like a 2010-era Windows laptop. In an ideal world, Graphene OS or /e/OS would offer an alternative ROM, but neither does as of this writing.
Still, for the price, the Idea Tab Pro is tough to beat. It's powerful enough for casual use, which is what most of us do with our tablets, and priced that way as well. There is also the slightly cheaper Plus model, but I think the much better performance of the Tab Pro is worth the extra $40.
Amazon’s Fire tablets are the cheapest of the cheap. More charitably, you might call them ultra-affordable tablets. They are so cheap—around
Amazon’s Fire tablets are the cheapest of the cheap
The Amazon tablet to get is the Fire HD 10. It's the most powerful of the Fire tablets (technically, the Fire Max 11 is more powerful, but it's more expensive and not as good of a value). 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 enough 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 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. Still, for about $75 on sale, the Fire HD 10 is crazy cheap and does work.
Ironically, the best tablet to get if you want to use an alternative operating system is the Google Pixel Tablet, which works flawlessly with Graphene OS. You'll have to buy the tablet and install Graphene OS yourself, but it's a web-based install that's incredibly simple to use. When you're done, you'll have a basic install of Graphene OS with no Google anywhere to be found. Should you want to install apps from the Play Store, you can install a sandboxed version of the Google Play Store, and everything will just work, though the Play Store will not be able to harvest any data from you (or very little anyway).
The Pixel is on the small side at 11 inches, and really more like a big Pixel phone than other tablets on this page. But the LCD screen is sharp, it has good speakers, and you can't beat Graphene OS as a secure, private operating system. There's no real keyboard bundle, but you can always use something like the Keychron B1 Pro for $40 and have a pretty compact travel setup that you can conceivably use for actual work as well as entertainment.
The main downside here is that the Pixel Tablet dates from 2023, and the lack of updates since means Google doesn't appear to have much interest in building any more tablets. But since you're using Graphene OS, you should have good OS-level support well into the future.
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Key Takeaways
- 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
- 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
- Be sure to check out our other buying guides, including the Best Amazon Fire Tablets, Best i Pad, and Best i Pad Accessories
- The Luxury Android Tablet: Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra
- The Best De-Googled Android Tablet: Google Pixel with Graphene OS
