If you are thinking about buying a new tablet but want to spend less than Apple charges for an iPad, but want an Android tablet with better specs than Amazon’s Fire tablet range, your answer could be the Samsung Galaxy Tab A11.

The Tab A11 has a reasonably compact 8.7-inch LCD screen with a 90Hz refresh rate, so scrolling on websites and in apps should look smooth and fluid. It’s only 8mm thick and 335g, so should disappear easily in a bag and won’t weigh you down.

It has Dolby certified dual speakers for when you want to settle in watch a movie, though unlike any current iPad model there is also a 3.5mm headphone jack so you can plug in wired headphones if you prefer them to the wireless Bluetooth alternative.

With a 5MP front facing camera, the Tab A11 is also a great choice if you want an affordable tablet to use for video calls. Thanks to the Google Play Store, you get full access to any Android app, so it doesn’t matter if you want to use Zoom, WhatsApp, Google Meet or any other service – they are all available.

This is the main advantage of a Samsung Android tablet over Amazon’s Fire tablet range. Though the Fire tablets can cost even less, they run Fire OS, which is Amazon’s Android version that does not allow for the installation of Google-made apps. This means Amazon tablets can’t download Gmail, YouTube, Google Meet, or any Google branded app.

With 4GB RAM you should be warned that this won’t be the zippiest tablet in town, nor should you expect it to run high-end mobile games such as Genshin Impact or Call of Duty Mobile. But for the odd round of Candy Crush Saga and the morning Wordle, you’ll be fine.

You should be able to fit a fair few apps on the Galaxy Tab A11, but with 64GB storage you might have to keep an eye if you don’t fill up the storage. If you want to keep lots of media files such as MP3s or video files on the tablet to listen or view, the device does have a microSD card slot so you can expand the storage up to 2TB with the right card (sold separately).