5 Best Android Tablets in 2026: OnePlus, Lenovo, and Pixel Compared

I’ve been using Android tablets pretty much since they first came out, and I’ve never felt the need for something made by a fruitless company. Android tablets are great entertainment centers, or they can be perfect replacements for lightweight laptops for travel.

Whatever your use case, I’ve tested almost all Android tablets, and these are the best, depending on what you need them for. If you want to see how these stack up against all those iPad things, check out our guide to all the tablets on the market.

Be sure to check out our other buying guides, including the best Amazon Fire tablets, best iPads, and best iPad accessories.

best android tablets

The best overall Android tablet I’ve tried is the OnePlus Pad 3. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip delivers great performance with plenty of power for gaming, photo editing and watching 4K video. The 13.2-inch LCD screen offers 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 that, not even the iPad Air. The Pad 3’s screen is one of the nicer LCD panels I’ve tested, and it’s easy to read even in bright sunlight. One nice thing about the LCD instead of OLED screen is that the Pad 3 has excellent battery life. I’ve watched movies back-to-back on airplane flights and barely got down halfway, and thanks to the 80-watt fast-charging point, you can recharge up to 50 percent in less than half an hour, with a full recharge taking about 1.5 hours. I also like that it loses almost no power in standby mode. OnePlus rates it at 70 days standby mode, but that’s with WiFi off. In the real world, I can leave it sitting there for a week, and it’ll still be 70 percent charged.

One of the reasons I think the Pad 3 is the best tablet for most people is that it’s not only great for consuming content (that’s how I watch most baseball games), but it’s also possible to work on it. OnePlus’ OxygenOS software is the best multi-tasking UI for an Android tablet. I prefer it even more than Apple’s iPadOS because of its open canvas system. Using Open Canvas, you can put three apps side by side, which is admittedly cramped, but still useful, or you can do what I do and use two apps side by side and expand a third at the bottom and scroll down to access it. For me, this means a text editor at the bottom, which I effectively use in full screen, and then I can scroll up to access my web browser and secondary apps, which live side-by-side. It’s a great way to work; The only drawback is the OnePlus Pad keyboard, which I don’t like.

The keyboard is sold separately for $200 (it’s not currently available in the US), and although it’s a nice keyboard, with good key travel and a decent-sized trackpad, it really only works on a completely flat surface. In other words, it’s fine if you’re sitting at some sort of table, but it’s pretty much unusable on your lap. This really limits the Pad 3’s usefulness, and I hope OnePlus improves the design in a future version. Unfortunately, this is somewhat unlikely as OnePlus is currently in a merger with Realme and its future is doubtful to say the least. We’ve already seen the Pad 4 debut in India (with little more than a chip and battery update), but so far, nothing for the rest of the world.

luxury android tablet

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11 and Tab S11 Ultra are the iPad Pros of the Android world. They have flagship specs, and with just 0.20 inches of thickness (5.1 mm), the Ultra matches the looks nicely. They’re a little heavier than the iPad Pro, but not so much that I can really notice a difference. Unlike the previous generation Tab S10 series, there is no longer a middle “Plus” model. You have the 11-inch Tab S11 and the larger, 14.6-inch Tab S11 Ultra. Both run Android 16 out of the box, have 120-Hz AMOLED displays, and can reach a peak brightness of 1,600 nits. Samsung uses a MediaTek processor, the Dimensity 9400+, which closely matches the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite in the OnePlus Pad. Both models get 12GB of RAM (if you choose the 1-terabyte Ultra model, the RAM goes up to 16GB). Storage can be expanded via microSD.