As the largest retailer in the United States, Walmart already sells a lot of tablets including iPads, Windows tablets, and Android devices.

But now Walmart is starting to sell its own line of cheap Android tablets. You can pick up one of the retailer’s onn-branded tablets for around $100 or less from Walmart.com.

As expected, that makes them competitive with Amazon’s low-cost Fire tablets, but for some reason Bloomberg still insists on calling Walmart’s new budget tablets iPad competitors anyway.

Anyway, the first model to go on sale is the $64 Onn Android Tablet with an 8 inch display. Onn, by the way, is Walmart’s house-owned brand. It’s sort of like Best Buy’s Insignia brand… but for Walmart.

The Onn 8 inch Android tablet features a 1280 x 800 IPS pixel display, a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, Android 9 software, a 2MP rear camera and a 0.3MP front-facing camera. It supports 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.

While those aren’t exactly iPad-challenging specs, on paper this does look like it could give Amazon’s $70 Fire HD 8 a run for the money.

It has more RAM than Amazon’s tablet, and ships with the Google Play Store installed (along with a “Walmart app suite,” whatever that is.

On the other hand, Walmart is only promising up to 5 hours of battery life. Amazon’s Fire HD 8 runs for up to 8 hours on a charge. The latest Fire HD 8 also has a 2MP front camera.

According to Bloomberg, Walmart will also offer a 10.1 inch model for $79 and a 10.1 inch model + detachable keyboard for $99, but neither of those options seem to be available yet.

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19 replies on “Walmart launches a line of cheap Android tablets (priced $100 or lower)”

  1. I bought one to try. It has what looks like a separate screen protector film under the peel-off shipping screen protector. It even has a few bubbles under the film. They’re unobtrusive, but definitely there. I’d rather be touching the glass directly, I’m afraid that the film might not be designed to peel of and it could damage the unit — as happened with the folding Samsung.

    I like it better than the Fire 8″, which I tried and gave away when it became annoyingly sluggish after installing the Google Play Store and other pieces to make it work more like a regular Android tablet. The Onn tablet works fine for casual reading, web browsing, and other basic functions. The SD card slot works well for adaptoble storage, so the 16GB isn’t too limiting.

    I’m still looking for a replacement for my old Nexus 7. I’d pay 150-200 for a 8″ tablet with 1080p, current OS (with updates for a couple of years), and a fingerprint reader.

  2. These will be more interesting in a year or two with Chrome OS rather than Android. Not necessarily because you would want the desktop interface but because you’d want the Chrome OS update approach.
    Still, w/ Android 9 this isn’t as bad an idea as it used to be due to Google doing so many updates in place on Android these days without having to get a full Android update from the OEM – which may never come.

  3. There is so much room in the tablet market between the high priced products at the $400+ segment and the sub $100 segment, but that space is such a wasteland now. Is it just the US market? Have we killed off the middle-class so badly that the market only caters to the poor and the rich?

    1. Agreed… I looked for something similar in size/quality of 2013 Nexus 7 for a couple years but wasn’t going to spend $400+ for Samsung kit. Finally gave up and bought 128GB iPad Mini 4 when they were being sold for less than $300 there for awhile. Ya… it’s a 2015 design but specs are good enough for what I need – I was bumping up against the 16GB memory limit of the Nexus 7.

  4. Enticing as an Amazon killer. Shame about the 5 hour battery life. Android 9 with playstore is huge! If these things turn out to be more easily hackable (rom/flashable) the rom community is going to embrace these devices like crazy.

    At these prices, teardowns shouldn’t be cost prohibitive… leading to battery replacement tips. Hoping Walmart gave the enthusiastic and vocal hacker community some thought – it would benefit them greatly.

  5. All three models are available at the local Walmart here in AZ. I’ll probably pick up the $100 10.1″ w/keyboard to see how well it performs. The photos of it look very nice for the price, but we all know how different reality is from photos.

    I’m curious to see how closely (or not) it gets to the quality of the Fire HD 10.

    1. looks like the same board in all 3 ONN, and the same screen res… So hard to say since the fire 10 has a stronger proc than the fire 8 and the res is higher than the 8…however same amount of ram in both in the ONN and the Fire 10…that’s a toss up…performance vs os type, personally although i have a couple i really hate fire os and if you try to hack either the 8 or 10″ with google services it slow them down terribly even after cache wipes, etc…oh yeah quality…though nothing tablet wise amazon has put out since the hdx’s has that quality..its passable i’m wondering about these ONN

      1. I have 2 kindles, and while I can live with FireOS, the speed of these things is terrible. Even streaming videos choke badly while playing. I hope these are better

        1. My Kindle 10 has no issues. It is much faster than the 7s that we have.

  6. Not bad. :O I’d hold out for a 1920 option, but I like that screen size. Coming with the play store out of the box is a good plus too.

    1. I’m thinking that Amazon saves server resources when only serving content to a 1280 x 800 screen.
      Pennies per video, but it all adds up.

      1. I never actually thought of that, but you’re probably right. The lower res video would be a bit easier on the processor and battery, too. 🙂

        My reason for liking 1920×1080/1200 so much is actually for PDF textbooks / rulebooks — it made a huge difference for me going from the Nexus 7 to the Nexus 7 2013; you can always zoom in and pan around, but 1920 pixels is enough to keep it full screen. Granted, that’s probably not the use case for most!

  7. Saw all three in the cabinet under the tablet display at the local WalMart (Louisiana) but none were being displayed yet.

    1. Where in La? I live outside of New Orleans and would like to try the one with Keyboard.

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