Current best 7" Tablet?

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
Joined
Oct 29, 2000
Messages
38,739
Hey all,

I have a 7" 2013 Nexus 7 which has served me very well. Dropped it and smashed the screen a couple of years ago, and replaced the screen, but it has never been the same since, and now is starting to have other problems as well.

This coupled with the fact that it is no longer receiving security updates, and that the few Nougat projects for it seem to have stagnated and died in beta-like state, has me thinking that maybe its time to put it to rest. It had a good 4 year run.

Question is, is there anything at all like it out there to replace it? Ideally it would be a smallish tablet like the Nexus 7, with a OEM that cares enough to offer frequent security updates.

I don't really care much about the hardware or resolution. The 1080p and slowish older hardware the Nexus 7 has are already good enough for me. I mostly use it for navigation in my car, and a handful of other things like that. The larger screen of the Nexus 7 compared to a phone, makes it much easier to glance at to keep up with my directions than with a phone, and it frees up my phone to be the car music player, and allows me to take handsfree calls without interrupting my directions.

Question is, does anything like I want exist? Relatively low cost 7" tablet with modest hardware and frequent security updates?

I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Is the Dell Venue 8 7000 any good?

EDIT:

Thanks for all the input guys.

I found a cheap 8" T-Mobile LG G Pad X (v521) on Swappa, and put LineageOS on it and am pretty happy.

It's not high end by any means, but it gets the job done as my navigation device.

Note: Installing custom recovery was MUCH more involved than the LineageOS install guide would suggest.
 
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Is the Dell Venue 8 7000 any good?

Scratch that one. It has an OLED screen. With my usage (mostly Wave navigation app) I'll burn that screen in in no time.

I'll need something with an LCD screen.

Asus Zenpad Z8 maybe? I remember having a positive experience with my Zenfone 2 a couple of years ago.
 
Asus Zenpad Z8 maybe? I remember having a positive experience with my Zenfone 2 a couple of years ago.

This one actually seems to meet my criteria pretty well.

Decent price, non-fancy hardware. Only bummer seems to be that Asus doesnt seem to be frequently updating the ROM on it like I am used to with Nexus devices. it is still stuck on 7.0, but it appears to be easy to root and flash custom roms on, and have a lively aftermarket ROM community, so this might be the one...

Still would appreciate any suggestions though.
 
This one actually seems to meet my criteria pretty well.

Decent price, non-fancy hardware. Only bummer seems to be that Asus doesnt seem to be frequently updating the ROM on it like I am used to with Nexus devices. it is still stuck on 7.0, but it appears to be easy to root and flash custom roms on, and have a lively aftermarket ROM community, so this might be the one...

Oh damn. US version seems to be Verizon only. I wonder if it is carrier locked, or if I can get it to work on other carriers LTE networks...

This seems to suggest it can
 
it is still stuck on 7.0, but it appears to be easy to root and flash custom roms on, and have a lively aftermarket ROM community,

I may have to take this back. I was confusing the Zenpad 8 and Z8. The Z8 was the one that was interesting to me, but it is verizon only, and doesn't appear to have much of a ROM community, so I'm guessing its bootloader locked.
 
Is it just me and I could be off about this but... but... are you actually having an entire thread discussing things with yourself? Am I butting in with this post? :D
 
Is it just me and I could be off about this but... but... are you actually having an entire thread discussing things with yourself? Am I butting in with this post? :D

Nothing wrong with updating my post as I discover new relevant information :p
 
iPads are the only tabs worth owning now. This is coming from someone who has never even owned an iPad and has a Shield Tablet; the only spiritual successor to the Nexus 7 2013. Samsung is the only one making Android tabs with decent hardware, but their software sucks (both in terms of UI and update support). The Pixel C is the only one I'd consider having now, but Google still thinks it's worth $600 after two years and it's the wrong form factory you're looking for.

The only alternative is to get another Nexus 7 2013 or Sheild Tab super cheap if you can and root/ROM them. Nvidia is still amazingly supporting the Shield Tab with updates (just got one a month or two ago), but I'd say after 3 years it has to be EOL'd soon.

With phones approaching the 7" display mark now, this tablet form factor has all but died it seems and Chromebooks are supposed to replace Android tabs otherwise now that they run Android apps. I don't think they offer the same functionality, but it's Google's will and they're basically forcing Android tabs to die.
 
Android not having very many tablet specific apps makes it not a good ecosystem to buy into. Android tablets is to tablets what windows phones are to phones.
 
Having done some research on this topic recently the best Android upgrade options seem to be the following:
1. Nvidia K1 shield. Pros: powerful for games, Nougat. Cons: older hardware, hard to find for sale new.
2. Amazon Fire HD. Pros: low cost. Cons: locked into Amazon ecosystem, although Google Play can be installed if you tinker with it.
3. Huawei Mediapad M3. Pros: screen, audio. Cons: not great for high end games, Huawei UI, uncertain Android updates.

There are some other decent Android tablets by Samsung with 4/3 10" screens. However, I share your affinity for the 7" ish screen size, widescreen.

As others have said iPads are better if you don't mind going with Apple. Personally, I am ready to get the Huawei if they update it to Nougat.
 
The Shield is basically the best you can get right now for that size. I personally got a pair of free LG GPad Xs from T-Mobile, and they've been awesome for our needs. They'd be great for permanent mounting for GPS/entertainment.
 
My tablets are a Dell Venue 11 Pro, a Dell Venue 8 Pro, and a Nuvision 8 inch 1080p IPS tablet. The Venue 11 Pro is by far the best one with 8GB, 256GB SSD and glass touch screen with up to 256GB SD card slot. I have upgraded it with a Dell 5805 LTE card and an Intel 8265 wireless card. All of the tablets are up to date as they run Windows 10 latest version.
 
Well, my Nexus 7 has been getting increasingly bad, with intermittent GPS signal problems which is particularly bad since I primarily use it for GPS navigation in the car.

I browsed through the Lineage OS list of supported devices and found that the 8" LG G Pad X (T Mobile Version) is fully supported in LineageOS, and there was one on Swappa listed as being Mint and selling for only about $100, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Not the greatest CPU, GPU or storage space these days, but it does have a SDcard slot if I need it, and for primarily GPS nav, it ought to do the trick.

I particularly like that the screen is IPS, and not OLED, as this means my GPS nav UI won't burn into the screen while driving on bright sunny days.

The fact that it is the Tmobile version should make it a particularly good match for my Google Project Fi network.

I'll post back here how it goes for posterity.

At $100, if it doesnt work out, I won't have wasted THAT much cash.
 
Thanks for the update Zara, I would like to hear how the LG G Pad works out.
 
Zara, T-Mo sent us 2 of those tablets for free last black friday, and I put Lineage on mine immediately. Not a bad little device.
 
The Gpad X is a pretty decent little tablet. Honestly I havent seen anything better short of an iPad & since the iPad mini Cellular is so far out of date there isnt even an iPad that would work for you. Between me & my girlfriend we have given the Gpad X & Gpad x2 out 5 times & the only one that ever had an issue was when my daughter changed the sim herself & put a nano sim into a micro sim slot & I ended up destroying the tablet before I could get it back out (so totally not the fault of the tablet).

As entropism pointed out T-Mobile gives them out for free sometimes. So the one you picked up was one that someone probably got for free & then realized that they weren't actually going to use a tablet, so it likely only has a couple hours of lifetime use on it.
 
The sad thing is the android tablet market is completely dead..

Agreed. I feel like very few people are willing to carry two devices, so once phablets took off, those who wanted larger screen son the go just got one of those, and those who didn't, were happy to keep their larger screens primarily for home use.

That doesn't mean that a 7-8" class android tablet can't make a great Waze/Spotify machine for car use though. Hopefully they won't stop development of these apps, but I doubt they will, because very many people still use them on their phones, and there really isn't a need for dedicated tablet versions of the app.
 
Agreed. I feel like very few people are willing to carry two devices, so once phablets took off, those who wanted larger screen son the go just got one of those, and those who didn't, were happy to keep their larger screens primarily for home use.

That doesn't mean that a 7-8" class android tablet can't make a great Waze/Spotify machine for car use though. Hopefully they won't stop development of these apps, but I doubt they will, because very many people still use them on their phones, and there really isn't a need for dedicated tablet versions of the app.
I agree. It be nice to have for certain scenarios but... I don't want to spend top dollar for a sevice that does not get used every day
 
Zara, T-Mo sent us 2 of those tablets for free last black friday, and I put Lineage on mine immediately. Not a bad little device.

Nice, Do you happen to recall how you did it and if you had any problems?

I got the device today, and it seems pretty nice. I started working on installing LineageOS following their guide here.

Unlocking the bootloader worked fine, but their link to TWRP's page for the v521 image is broken. I spent some time searching around the TWRP page for th eproper image, but couldn't find it.

I found another one on XDA here, however when I go to use fastboot to flash it to the device, I get a "remote: unknown command" error.

Code:
fastboot flash recovery TWRP-3.1.1-0_v521-recovery.img 
target reported max download size of 536870912 bytes
sending 'recovery' (16170 KB)...
OKAY [  0.510s]
writing 'recovery'...
FAILED (remote: unknown command)
finished. total time: 0.511s


I've never seen this one before, and I am not having much luck googling it.

I came across this post which suggests that fastboot isn't fully enabled on these devices, and you have to do some dicking around in the stock image to make it work, but I can't find any further details.

If you recall and can share how you did it, I'd appreciate the help.
 
Nice, Do you happen to recall how you did it and if you had any problems?

I got the device today, and it seems pretty nice. I started working on installing LineageOS following their guide here.

Unlocking the bootloader worked fine, but their link to TWRP's page for the v521 image is broken. I spent some time searching around the TWRP page for th eproper image, but couldn't find it.

I found another one on XDA here, however when I go to use fastboot to flash it to the device, I get a "remote: unknown command" error.

Code:
fastboot flash recovery TWRP-3.1.1-0_v521-recovery.img
target reported max download size of 536870912 bytes
sending 'recovery' (16170 KB)...
OKAY [  0.510s]
writing 'recovery'...
FAILED (remote: unknown command)
finished. total time: 0.511s


I've never seen this one before, and I am not having much luck googling it.

I came across this post which suggests that fastboot isn't fully enabled on these devices, and you have to do some dicking around in the stock image to make it work, but I can't find any further details.

If you recall and can share how you did it, I'd appreciate the help.

To follow up, if anyone needs it, I am attempting to install TWRP using the dirtycow method as outlined here.

It seems to be working thus far, but it is unclear. Issuing these commands takes a VERY long time.
 
To follow up, if anyone needs it, I am attempting to install TWRP using the dirtycow method as outlined here.

It seems to be working thus far, but it is unclear. Issuing these commands takes a VERY long time.

Ack, never mind. It's not working, but I know why.

I forgot to downgrade to 20f stock ROM. (Mine came with 20L) You have to do this in order for the exploit to work. It's getting too late. I'm going to try again tomorrow.

Seems like a nice little device, but installing custom recovery is definitely more involved than on any other device I've tried it on before.
 
Side Note: The G Pad is nice, but the stock launcher is weird. (Which won't be a problem as soon as I get LineageOS on it)

I can't seem to find a way to show all installed apps. There's usually an icon in the bottom center that accomplishes this.

It also has a weird extra button on the side below the volume rocker which I can't for the life of me figure out what it does.
 
The Huawei Mediapad M5 tablet just hit the FCC and is coming in a few weeks... Waiting for that.
 
The Huawei Mediapad M5 tablet just hit the FCC and is coming in a few weeks... Waiting for that.


I just couldn't bring myself to do that.

Huawei is owned by China Telecom, a part of the Chinese government.

I just wouldn't be comfortable with that. It's bad enough that I have Google spies in my pocket, but all they want is advertising data. I don't need commie spies in my pocket as well.

I just don't trust a product designed by a wholly owned subsidiary of an authoritarian dictatorial regime which suppresses freedoms, censors information and "disappears" political dissidents.
 


Don't need evidence. Just trace the money. I don't trust any device made by a company owned by any government in the world, especially not a company owned by an oppressive regime.

I wouldn't buy a phone or tablet made by a company owned by the U.S. government either.

Maybe they aren't spying today, but if they wanted to its an easy software update away. From a government known for its industrial espionage (they pretty much created their solar panels El industry through military based hacking and electronic espionage of U.S. panel manufacturers, and then tried to turn around and dump those panels at low cost on the international market).

It's like a girl saying: "You know, I know he is famous for his date rape, but I'm just going to drink whatever drink he gives me anyway. There is no evidence he is raping me right now!". It's extremely naive.

It's also clear that cultural differences and lack of regulations make Chinese designed products in general higher risk in this regard. Just look at the Lenovo pre-installed malware scandal.

For me, all devices designed in China are off the table, just can't trust them, but ESPECIALLY Huawei due to them being owned by China Telecom.

I can't imagine running any business or government agency and allowing Chinese designed devices to be used in their BYOD program. It's just WAY too large of a risk.
 
OnePlus, Oppo, ZTE, Blu, Xiaomi, Meizu, Lenovo, Motorola Mobility... All chinese.

Show me where they are *owned by china telecom*? China telecom is a Chinese state-owned telecommunication company. It is the largest fixed-line service and the third largest mobile telecommunication provider in China. Why wouldn't huawei work with a large telecom in their own country to make sure their products work? To further technology and get better service?

Huawei is owned by the employees of the company. Ren founded the company after leaving the army, and is the head person and owns a controlling share of the company, but their board is publicly known and the chinese employees mostly are stock owners without a vote on the board.


You're making bold claims. Show me where you traced the money. I would like to not support a company that is evil.

So far, you have only made some xenophobic claims then not backed them up.
 
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OnePlus, Oppo, ZTE, Blu, Xiaomi, Meizu, Lenovo, Motorola Mobility... All chinese.

Yep. And I don't trust them.

Don't get me wrong. I'll be some cheap stamped metal can opener from China, but if it is dealing with something sensitive, like data, then no.

Show me where they are *owned by china telecom*? China telecom is a Chinese state-owned telecommunication company. It is the largest fixed-line service and the third largest mobile telecommunication provider in China. Why wouldn't huawei work with a large telecom in their own country to make sure their products work? To further technology and get better service?

Huawei is owned by the employees of the company. Ren founded the company after leaving the army, and is the head person and owns a controlling share of the company, but their board is publicly known and the chinese employees mostly are stock owners without a vote on the board.

I'll have to concede this one. I was wrong. I thought I had read they were outright owned by China Telecom somewhere. Maybe I misunderstood what I read, or maybe I just read bad information. Can't remember.

So I stand corrected. Huawei is no more suspect than the rest of the chinese device makers. Well, maybe a little. The link to the Army is a little suspect, given the fact that the chinese army have been behind huge hacks for industrial espionage in the west.

So far, you have only made some xenophobic claims then not backed them up.

There is a huge difference between xenophobia and legitimate concerns. I speak three languages and have lived more years outside the U.S. than I have inside. I don't have a xenophobic bone in my body.

The truth - however - is this. There is only one category of legitimate governments in the world, and those are the liberal democracies. (Just to be 100% clear, that's a lower case L) They come in many forms, parliamentarian, constitutional republic, you name it. When they are not - however - the guarantees we have for the rule of law, and proper regulation do not exist. I trust products from pretty much anywhere in Europe. I trust products from Japan and products from Korea. I do not trust networked products designed in China. (Or Russia, or North Korea, or Iran, etc, but to my knowledge they don't sell any phones or tablets here)

In these countries the government IS the law. Sure, they have rules on the books to maintain some faux legitimacy, but in the end, if the party/military wants you to spy on someone for them, you don't have a choice.

This is particularly problematic coming from China, with so many documented cases of state sponsored industrial espionage via special hacking groups within the military. These are not just some crazy unfounded xenophobic claims. We are in the midst of the worst reported on electronic warfare vs China in history, and we are losing. Evidence or not, it is pretty much to be assumed at this point that China is using every avenue at their disposal to attack and steal data from U.S. and other western nations corporations, and more, and in an authoritarian dictatorial regime, their companies do not have a choice but to play along. To not assume so is hopelessly naive, given what we already know.

But lets put that aside for a moment. What is another hallmark of nations with authoritarian regimes? Massive corruption. Maybe that's how malware wound up on all those Lenovo laptops. Maybe not. Who knows. Corruption - however - is a huge problem in China. Whether it be government officials taking bribes, or companies cutting corners, and managers pocketing the change. There is a long string of examples of this, everywhere from poisoned milk, pet food, or toothpaste or faked automotive safety testing to name a few. The examples of this are too numerous to mention, and the sheer volume points to some underlying problem in China that doesn't exist elsewhere to this extent, even in other corrupt authoritarian regimes. I don't claim to know what it is. Maybe ~65 years of living under authoritarian rule left the country without a set of norms of proper entrepreneurial behavior that we have learned over time, and maybe this coupled with the fiercely competitive nature of Chinese culture has resulted in some sort of perfect storm? Who knows. Not my field by a country mile. I can just look at the facts and confirm that it is there.

Anyway, long story short. I don't trust China. I think it is bad enough we have to buy electronics that are made there, but devices that are DESIGNED there are just a bad idea all around.


upload_2018-1-30_19-49-8.png



And with that, can we please get back to the topic at hand?
 
China's lack of regulations is America's Capitalists' dream come true... You made some good points until you brought out government corruption. Our government is no longer a democracy, but rather an oligarchy. When 75% of our people wants something, and yet the government do something else to the opposite of what the people want, that's pretty insane. Not only is lobbying is a legal form of bribery, corporations are people except you can't charge them for murder... So corporations are a special class of people in America. Lobbying and religion have politicians denying scientific facts. Many of our prisons are for-profit, and prisons in general are filled with more people per capita than in China. The judicial system often treats people of a particular race unfairly. Cops here also kill more people total than Chinese cops do. The health industry could bankrupt people for trying to live! Just saying you should also probably stop buying American products because America is pretty corrupt too.
 
Moving right along.

I finally got the LG G Pad X up running LineageOS.

Having most of my experience on Nexus devices, this was a much more convoluted way of getting to custom recovery and installing LineageOS, and the official LineageOS installation guide for this device is completely wrong.

I finally figured it out after I discovered this post on the XDA Developers forums.

The method goes something like this:

1.) Use LG's LGUP tool (Windows only) to downgrade to official image 20f (mine had 20l on it)

2.) Once downgraded, use the dirty cow exploit to flash custom recovery.

3.) With custom recovery flashed, install LineageOS.


Except, there are problems along the way for each step.

I couldn't get #1 to work at all with LG's vanilla tool. With the latest 4.2 LG drivers, and a customized version of LGUP called UPPERCUT installed, it worked, but the only version of UPPERCUT I could find tested positive for a particularly nasty keylogging and password stealing malware. The authors claim it was a false positive but I don't trust them at all, so I imaged my windows drive, then proceeded to download all the files I'd need. Then disabled all network interfaces and disconnected all other drives before booting back up again and disabling my antivirus so I could flash the old 20f official image to my device. Then I restored the image I took of windows from before flashing.

During #2 I had some trouble. At first I didn't think the dirtycow scripts were working, but it turns out they just take a while to execute. The final step in this process (adb logcat -s recowvery) didn't work at first getting stuck. After doing a CTRL-C and running it again, it worked the second time, and I was able to use the dd command to flash twrp to the recovery partition.

Once in TWRP (#3) I once again had issues, as I could not access the data partition in order to wipe it. After somemessing around I figured out that if I reformatted it as ext2, and then formatted it back to ext4 again, I was able to read it. So now with cache, dalvik-cache, data and system partitions wiped, I was able to install LineageOS.

After a nerve wrackingly long first boot, I finally got a sigh of relief when it worked properly.

Works great as a GPS nav!

tablet nav.jpg
 
Between an LG G Pad F7.0, an Alcatel OneTouch Pop 7, a Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 LTE SGH-I467, and the Wacom Cintiq Companion Hybrid, I've got some bad news: the state of Android tablets is pretty garbage.

The low-end ones like the first two that carriers will practically give away to people who don't know any better have only 1 GB of RAM and 4 GB of internal storage, and the latter even has a low-res TN panel that is unacceptable in today's market.

It's even worse in the Pop 7's case when its file manager doubles as some Clean Master sorta crap that spams the notification tray and is a system app that can't be removed without root.

Now, the latter two are higher-end ones, but the Note 8.0 is an AT&T variant complete with a pesky locked bootloader that nobody's found a workaround to, otherwise I would've thrown LineageOS on it by now. Damn shame, as it was otherwise a very good yard sale find for next to nothing, and still way better than the other two on a hardware and usability level despite running KitKat.

And the Cintiq Hybrid? Well, it's a good, if bulky, piece of hardware. Android side is nearly bone stock AOSP, though you don't really buy these things as Android tablets as much as you want a Cintiq 13HD that's useful on the go. The problem is that said bone stock AOSP is Jelly Bean 4.2.1 with no updates EVER past that point, with no fastboot mode, no kernel sources, no dev community, and a Tegra 4 SoC that NVIDIA discontinued software support for back in the Marshmallow days. It's perfectly good hardware, crippled by even worse software support than the Note 8.0 got and no dev community whatsoever surrounding it.

Even for all of these, there's too many instances of software not really being optimized for tablet use, as if the UI treats it like a jumbo-size smartphone screen.

All in all, I hate to admit it, but Android on tablets is as good as dead. Even Google's not trying there any more. You're far better off with an iPad Pro or an old Surface Pro 2, because at least those will net you good software support with frequent updates and developers that'll give you software that properly utilizes a bigger screen.

But since you already had that G Pad X and LineageOS'd it, I'd say you did pretty good turning it into an up-to-date, useful piece of kit. Mounting it in a car like that actually reminds me as to why I don't see the point in having built-in car infotainment systems when older vehicles can easily just have a tablet propped up on the dash and have the radio head unit swapped with an aftermarket one packing Bluetooth/3.5mm aux input, with the bonus of the tablet running nav software whose maps don't get outdated quickly.
 
All in all, I hate to admit it, but Android on tablets is as good as dead. Even Google's not trying there any more. You're far better off with an iPad Pro or an old Surface Pro 2, because at least those will net you good software support with frequent updates and developers that'll give you software that properly utilizes a bigger screen.

But since you already had that G Pad X and LineageOS'd it, I'd say you did pretty good turning it into an up-to-date, useful piece of kit. Mounting it in a car like that actually reminds me as to why I don't see the point in having built-in car infotainment systems when older vehicles can easily just have a tablet propped up on the dash and have the radio head unit swapped with an aftermarket one packing Bluetooth/3.5mm aux input, with the bonus of the tablet running nav software whose maps don't get outdated quickly.


The problem isn't so much that Google isn't trying anymore as that it never really tried much to start with.

Google has this odd problem where it just cannot figure out how to support Android on any platform that isn't a phone. To this day, Google Play treats tablets as an afterthought; you can't go looking solely for tablet-optimized apps. The company didn't do much of anything to support hybrid apps when Android tablets were new, and its 'solution' was to offer a small bit of code that could kinda-sorta make an app tablet-friendly. Developers weren't given much incentive to write tablet-native apps, so they didn't.

I'd add that the "race to the bottom" philosophy of many non-Apple companies had a particularly nasty effect on Android tablets -- they were reduced to serving as dedicated Netflix viewers and remote controls. I suspect part of what has kept Apple on top in that space is that it has always stuck to the idea of a mobile OS tablet as a general computing device, and designed accordingly. It's somewhat telling that Apple's budget iPad is actually larger than before (9.7 inches versus 7.9) where Android slabs seem to struggle if they're any larger than 8 inches.

Some of this stems from smartphone screens getting ever larger and diminishing the urge to get an Android tablet, but you'd think that would have prompted a move to larger screens. Not so much, apparently.
 
The problem isn't so much that Google isn't trying anymore as that it never really tried much to start with.

Google has this odd problem where it just cannot figure out how to support Android on any platform that isn't a phone. To this day, Google Play treats tablets as an afterthought; you can't go looking solely for tablet-optimized apps. The company didn't do much of anything to support hybrid apps when Android tablets were new, and its 'solution' was to offer a small bit of code that could kinda-sorta make an app tablet-friendly. Developers weren't given much incentive to write tablet-native apps, so they didn't.

I'd add that the "race to the bottom" philosophy of many non-Apple companies had a particularly nasty effect on Android tablets -- they were reduced to serving as dedicated Netflix viewers and remote controls. I suspect part of what has kept Apple on top in that space is that it has always stuck to the idea of a mobile OS tablet as a general computing device, and designed accordingly. It's somewhat telling that Apple's budget iPad is actually larger than before (9.7 inches versus 7.9) where Android slabs seem to struggle if they're any larger than 8 inches.

Some of this stems from smartphone screens getting ever larger and diminishing the urge to get an Android tablet, but you'd think that would have prompted a move to larger screens. Not so much, apparently.
The weird thing is that Google wanted to seriously support tablets to the point that Android 3.0 Honeycomb was a tablet-only release, at least until they threw that notion out for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich going forward.

I still kinda remember when ICS was new, as I helped a friend of mine get the 2012 Nexus 7. Pretty compact for a tablet, felt like a gigantic smartphone more than anything, but seeing as it wasn't mine to keep, I wouldn't really get to form any detailed impressions until years later.

Nowadays, though? It's painfully obvious how Android doesn't really utilize larger screens as it is, due to the Cintiq Hybrid packing the same 13.3" 1920x1080 panel as its 13HD siblings and also bearing the same HDMI monitor functionality. In short, it's the sorta screen you'd find on a smaller laptop.

Windows makes much better use of its screen size, and this is taking into account that I manually set 100% DPI scaling (not worth using it unless you can go to at least 200%, which is best suited for at least 1440p at 13.3"). Web sites and apps aren't hilariously oversized, I can use multiple windows and split-screen (remember, it's stuck on Jelly Bean, so forget about Nougat split-screen, Oreo PIP, or the Samsung windowing they've had for years before), and the whole thing just doesn't feel crippled. Maybe it's because I've been accustomed to full-fledged Tablet PCs for what feels like at least a whole decade.

I also remember the original iPad and how Apple had to deal with what was a glorified iPhone interface to start with, and just looking at iOS 11 now, you can tell that they're getting serious about it being a general computing platform. They're still not quite there yet (no Xcode on iOS, for starters), but at least for those who draw for a living, they seem to be winning people over, and we're talking the sort of people who previously wouldn't consider anything less than Wacom's newest MobileStudio Pro lineup to get their work done. The iPad Pro's portability, ludicrous battery life, and class-leading screen and pen digitizer tech won them over to the point that they can live with not having full-fledged Photoshop or whatever on the go.

But back to Google: it seems that they're now pushing Chromebooks in the place that Android tablets used to fill. That's what I really mean when I say that Google's all but consigned Android to smartphones; they want all the beyond-pocket-sized things running Chrome OS now, especially now that they gave Chrome OS the ability to run Android apps. (How well it actually runs said Android apps is another question entirely, one I can't answer yet, but I'm not holding my breath on stuff like Clover Paint retaining pressure sensitivity, for starters.)
 
Here's a weird replacement: Xiaomi Mi Max 2 phone. Yes, it's 6.44" and not 7" but the difference is not so terrible and you can have a single device. It's cheap (250USD), easy to unlock et al.
 
Well, it was nice while it lasted. I'm about to give up on the Gpad x 8".

LineageOS dropped it from their supported devices in November last year, and I've been looking for alternate ROM's but can't find one that I trust. The security patch level is starting to get old enough that I am uncomfortable with it, even though I only use it for GPS nav.

That's the downside with 3rd party community supported ROM's. They can unceremoniously be dropped at any moment.

Well, at least I got a year and 10 months out of it. For the $80 I paid that's not terrible.

Trying to figure out what to replace it with, and hoping to high heavens the answer isn't an iPad mini. I've repeatedly sworn I would never own an Apple product again.
 
Meh. Comcrap gave me a new iPad (9.7", 128gb) for $100 on a promo they were having, and I like it a lot. Android on a tablet has always been a sub par experience, IMHO.
 
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