I need some advice, and the amount of marketing spam had made sorting the wheat from the chaff annoyingly difficult. Hopefully you can help.
I’ve a young daughter, who uses an old tablet of mine to watch netflix etc. unfortunately, it was old in the tooth when she was born, and it’s now become extremely annoying to use.
She currently has a Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2016). The size (10") works well, but it’s gotten slow as sin, and only has 16Gb of internal memory.
Preferences wise:
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10" screen (±2")
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64Gb+ storage.
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Long expected lifespan (inc security updates).
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Headphone socket (adapters are asking to get broken, Bluetooth go flat)
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Decent WiFi (more than just 2.4Ghz).
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USB C charging preferred.
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Wireless charging would be very helpful but not required.
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Lower budget preferred (£200 range).
What would people recommend?
steam deck
I have a steam deck, along with a steam controller, and a steam link.
The steam is definitely not a good replacement tablet for a young child.
why not? Also, to answer your question on Android specifically. The only 2 companies that don’t abandon their hardware in a year or two are Google and Samsung. And I wouldn’t recommend giving a Samsung device to a child. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/samsung-galaxy-tablets/
My daughter is currently 4, the steam deck is far too advanced for her to use reliably, and far too easy to damage. As it stands her current tablet is in a thick foam case, that makes it almost indestructible to normal damage. It’s also old enough that I wouldn’t be too upset if she decided to try and colour in on it, using Sharpies or snapped it in 2.
I’m also limiting to android because that’s what I’m most familiar with, and so is she. I’ve no interest in learning the apple ecosystem, with it’s lock in effect.
She is currently learning to read, so I need to stay ahead of her regarding cyber security and information access. Unfortunately the current tablet is so restricted on memory that I can’t install any parental control apps. I had to strip the cache from most of the less used apps, just to free up enough space to install a battery health monitoring app (accubattery).
My hope is the next tablet will do until she’s old enough to have a phone herself. At the same time, I’d rather not throw huge amounts of money at it. It’s still a tablet for a preteen, and so could get broken very easily.
my bad. I assumed she was older than that. A used pixel tablet is what I’d recommend. It’ll get security updates from Google until June 2028 and will probably continue to get updates from custom roms after that. But it won’t meet many of your other preferences.
Samsung now support their newer devices for 7 years too. But as I said earlier their privacy policy for children is ridiculous.
I am not condoning data collection in any way, especially not on kids devices but, direct quote:
There, all this if you create a Samsung account for them. So just… don’t? Not saying its right to collect all this, but the workaround is not to register with Samsung, you can still use the device, just not Samsung services.
Yes, but that’s from the privacy policy for their Samsung account specifically. Mozilla already says in the article that finding the relevant info on Samsung privacy policy is a nightmare. So, you need to keep in mind that you’d still be using Samsung flavor of Android and some of their apps. If I remember correctly even something as simple as their calculator app has close to 100 permission.