Resurrecting an old Tablet

 I recently was given two old 10”  Android tablets. I sold the non-working tablet on eBay for $25 to someone who knew better than I how to fix it.

I then bought a working tablet for the same $25.      It worked, but slowly.

Turns out there is an easy fix.       You hold down start and volume down until you got the choice to clean out the cache, volume down again to select, volume up to confirm.    Fixed.

The old tablets then worked as well as they did the day they were sold for 5 years ago for $400.

They had just gotten bottled up with numerous updates.

I came across two more such tablets at giveaway prices, one at $27, one $35.

While they cannot match an iPad, all these can do most everything except stream CBSN  or Reuters live. They do stream YouTube, but not YouTube TV.

While they cannot run the newer apps, they can usually run an alternative from the browser.     Once a browser shortcut is set up on the home screen, the shortcut performs just like an app.

While a bit slow on Wi-Fi, that shortfall does not show up on email subscriptions to media.

They come into their own mainly as nice big readers for Kindle, Google Play, and library books via Overdrive, plus Gutenbooks. Librivox, and Moon Reader.   Pandora and Spotify and Google Music also run fine.

These can be set up for easy use by anyone.

Tapping brings up choices and searches.

The best browser is often the browser that came with them such an old tablet, but also Opera and Firefox on a few.    

Running the Internet Archive from the browser then opens up an enormous wealth of media of all kinds.    This is a wonderful and underused resource.

So they are still great media machines, even though they are slow in browsing.    

The devices I evaluated were three Asus Eee Pad Transformers and one Samsung.   Despite their age, battery life was still excellent, They all run office apps.

Left is a page from Crime and Punishment for reading or listening.