This $79 tablet deal solved an embarrassing personal problem for me

(Image credit: Lenovo)

Every now and again, a tech deal can really change your life in a very immediate and critical way. That happened to me just this weekend ,when I purchased the Lenovo M9 tablet at Best Buy for $79 and gave it to my six year old daughter.

For months, I had been pushing aside a growing problem. My daughter loves watching videos on YouTube Kids, but she can't run the YouTube or YouTube Kids apps on her Amazon Fire for Kids tablet.

So my daughter would frequently come to me and ask to borrow my phone so she could run those apps. Being a doting dad and a sucker, I let her borrow my phone and she even learned how to unlock it herself and launch the apps.

However, lending your phone to a kid is not without its issues. And here's where the problems started.

I missed a lot of alerts on text messaging apps, including Slack, which I use for work. My daughter would bring me the phone if I was getting a call, but she would just swipe away notifications if they appeared while she was using my handset.

I ended up late to get some messages and this became more and more of a problem. But I didn't want so spend a lot of money just so my daughter could watch YouTube Kids. Then I saw a sale.

The Lenovo M9 tablet is now just $79 at Best Buy. This 9-inch tablet is has a 1340 x 800 resolution screen, a MediaTek Helio G80 processor with 8 cores, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. It charges over USB-C and seems to have a long battery life.

The M9 is not an Android tablet that runs standard Google apps such as YouTube and YouTube kids. Unlike many Android tablets, it has Google Kids Space that provides a custom child-friendly UI with parental controls baked in.

I bought the tablet via Best Buy's in-store pickup so I could get it in time for the weekend.

So my daughter got a tablet that is kid-safe, she gets to watch her favorite videos and I got my phone back so I can get alerts from work right away. It's a win-win for $79. The tablet seems light, bright and fast enough for what she's doing with it.

Whether you're shopping for a kid or an adult, this $79 Lenovo M9 deal is hard to beat.

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Avram Piltch is Tom's Hardware's editor-in-chief. When he's not playing with the latest gadgets at work or putting on VR helmets at trade shows, you'll find him rooting his phone, taking apart his PC or coding plugins. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram developed many real-world benchmarks, including our laptop battery test.

10 Comments Comment from the forums

Pemalite

Only 3GB of Ram is going to make it a terrible experience.

You would have gotten way way way more bang-for-buck with the Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ 128GB model with it's 8GB of Ram, it will get years worth of updates and actually remain usable and responsive.

3GB and 4GB tablets even in the budget space need to disappear, that's half a Google chrome tab.

We also can't forget the Superfish debacle.
Reply
DavidLejdar

Hmmm... software exists, with which it is possible to turn the tablet into an additional screen. And the connection between PC and tablet can be had via USB or WiFi. In particular, Spacedesk looks like what I would try.

Could be used as a remote for the desktop, and would take less power than a regular second screen, for whichever one may want to have an eye on during gaming session, such as HWInfo, or while watching a movie.

Pemalite said:
Only 3GB of Ram is going to make it a terrible experience. ...
For several bucks more, would be an argument. For 2.5 times the price though, to just run an app or two... 3 GB should be fine. Or in my case, on travel better to read on, than on a phone - and at home mostly as screen extension (so whatever is displayed on the tablet, runs on the PC's RAM etc.).
Reply
Alvar "Miles" Udell

Or the used market, pick up a second hand Galaxy Tab S6 Lite for about the same price.
Reply
Pemalite

DavidLejdar said:
For several bucks more, would be an argument. For 2.5 times the price though, to just run an app or two... 3 GB should be fine. Or in my case, on travel better to read on, than on a phone - and at home mostly as screen extension (so whatever is displayed on the tablet, runs on the PC's RAM etc.).
Even 4GB tablets exist for around the same price, if not slightly more.
25% extra Ram does make a difference.

I had a Galaxy Tab A7 a few years back and it was starting to struggle in the modern era as it just didn't have enough memory... 3GB isn't enough, even for basic tasks.

*****

Plenty of Chinese tablets with 8GB of Ram that sit in the same price bracket as that Lenovo like the Kadybe 2024 10" with it's Mediatek MT8183.
Reply
Findecanor

I think that 10" tablets are too large. The size of this tablet is almost pushing it.

How easy is it to put a directory tree of PDFs on it?
That is what I currently use my now ten-year old 8" Lenovo Windows tablet for. And it has higher screen resolution (280 PPI), built-in kick-stand and support for a stylus.
I have been wanting to get an upgrade for years but I've not found any that matched it — that wasn't an overpriced iPad Mini, with additional accessories. And I can't rsync my storage from my Linux PC to an iPad, can I?
Reply
Willaaam

Findecanor said:
I think that 10" tablets are too large. The size of this tablet is almost pushing it.

How easy is it to put a directory tree of PDFs on it?
That is what I currently use my now ten-year old 8" Lenovo Windows tablet for. And it has higher screen resolution (280 PPI), built-in kick-stand and support for a stylus.
I have been wanting to get an upgrade for years but I've not found any that matched it — that wasn't an overpriced iPad Mini, with additional accessories. And I can't rsync my storage from my Linux PC to an iPad, can I?
Sure you can rsync on an iPad, though I'd argue it's more logical to do it the other way around and rsync from your iPad. You can use that synched and nested folder structure from basically any modern app directly.

Not that I'm defending iOS as a workhorse, but it really isn't as stupid as it was years ago. I can use it as a python and node dev machine with git. I'm not saying I won't rather use my linux box, but I do feel iOS has too much of a reputation of being completely incapable.

https://acrosync.com/ios.html
--edit--

I think a-shell and iSH might include rsync as well, though not entirely sure.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-shell/id1473805438https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ish-shell/id1436902243
Reply
Notton

Pemalite said:
Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+
That's an 11", 500g tablet compared to the Lenovo M9, which is 9" and 350g.
And kids are not good at holding heavy tablets.
(Though I agree with you that the specs for the M9 are awful)
Reply
Heat_Fan89

You'd figure a tech writer would be able to figure out how to sideload Google Play on an Amazon Fire tablet. :sneaky:
Reply
Pemalite

Notton said:
That's an 11", 500g tablet compared to the Lenovo M9, which is 9" and 350g.
And kids are not good at holding heavy tablets.
(Though I agree with you that the specs for the M9 are awful)
Then get the Lonovo Tab One with 4GB of Ram.
Or the Galaxy Tab S9 FE with it's 6GB of Ram.

There are a plethora of cheap chinese tablets with 4-8GB memory options using Mediatek chips like the lenovo.

The Lenovo is just a bad purchase with it's 3GB of DRAM not providing longevity and it's erratic performance.
Reply
Alvar "Miles" Udell

There's also the Lenovo Idea Tab Pro for as little as $290.

https://www.androidpolice.com/lenovo-idea-tab-pro-review/
Reply

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