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

iPad? Never heard of it.

I’ve been using Android tablets since the first one came out and have never felt the need for anything made by a fruit company. Android tablets make great “nice to have” entertainment centers, or they can completely replace a lightweight laptop for traveling.

Whatever your use case, I’ve tested just about every Android tablet, and these are the best, depending on your needs. If you want to see how they compare to the iPad, check out our guide to all the tablets on the market.

Don’t forget to check out our other buying guides, including the best Amazon Fire tablets, the best iPad, and the best iPad accessories.

The best Android tablet

The best overall Android tablet I’ve tried in the OnePlus Pad 3. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip offers excellent performance, with plenty of power for gaming, photo editing, and watching 4K videos. The 13.2-inch LCD screen offers an excellent 3.4K resolution with a 144Hz refresh rate (again ideal 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 iPad Air. The Pad 3’s screen is one of the nicest LCD panels I’ve tested and easy to read even in bright sunlight. One of the advantages of the LCD screen rather than the OLED screen is that the Pad 3 has excellent battery life. I’ve watched back-to-back movies on plane flights and barely got below the halfway mark, and thanks to the 80-watt fast charging point, you can charge to 50% in less than half an hour, with a full charge taking around 1.5 hours. I also like the fact that it loses almost no power in sleep mode. OnePlus rates it at 70 days in standby mode, but that’s with WiFi turned off. In the real world, I can leave it lying around for a week and it will still be 70% charged.

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 (which is how I watch the majority of baseball games I watch), but it’s also possible to work on it. OnePlus’ OxygenOS software is the best multitasking user interface for Android tablets. I even prefer it to Apple’s iPadOS 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 the apps two side by side and expand a third at the bottom and scroll down to access 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 my secondary app, which live side by side. It’s a great way to work; the only downside is the OnePlus Pad keyboard, which I don’t like.

The keyboard is sold separately for $200 (it’s currently not available in the US), and while it’s a good keyboard, with good key travel and a decent-sized trackpad, it only really works on a perfectly flat surface. In other words, it’s fine if you’re sitting at a table of some sort, but practically unusable on your lap. This really limits the Pad 3’s usefulness, and I hope OnePlus improves the design in a future release. Unfortunately, this is somewhat unlikely as OnePlus is currently in a merger with Realme and its future is murky 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.

The luxury Android tablet

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11 and Tab S11 Ultra are the iPad Pro of the Android world. They have the flagship specs, and at just 0.20 inches thick (5.1 mm), the Ultra matches the look well. They’re slightly heavier than an iPad Pro, but not enough for me to really notice the difference. Unlike the previous generation Tab S10 series, there is no longer an intermediate “Plus” model. You have the 11-inch Tab S11 and the bigger one, the 14.6-inch Tab S11 Ultra. Both run Android 16, feature 120Hz AMOLED displays, and can reach a peak brightness of 1,600 nits. Samsung uses a MediaTek processor, the Dimensity 9400+, which is closely matched to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite in the OnePlus Pad. Both models have 12GB of RAM (if you opt for the 1 terabyte Ultra model, the RAM goes up to 16GB). Storage is expandable via microSD.