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I tried searching and came to the conclusion this does not exist. I would like a tablet with the following features:
- Easy to install (or pre-installed) LineageOS, or some other open source OS that doesnt require any fighting with bloatware or control over updates (please give your opinion on what is best)
- Easy to open up and repair (and mod) the device hardware myself without any special tools (ie, standard electronics screwdrivers, etc)
- Matte screen with dynamic range that allows the screen to be bright enough to use in the sun but dark enough to use while falling asleep.
I don't plan on using it for anything besides basic web browsing and pdf reading, so it should be cheap. However, price is no object if it has those features. There was one other soft criteria but it sounded like an ad so I removed it... See if you can guess.
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Ask the Community: In the Market for a Modern Tablet
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You love peace.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:11PM (3 children)
Can't help you with tablets specifically, but I'm in the market for a new phone with similar requirements. Although I'm also looking for an SD card slot and a removable battery. So for my needs, I've decided that the best option may actually be to go back a couple generations, because they just don't make 'em like they used to... When you say "modern" you might mean a year old, you might mean five...but it definitely sounds like you shouldn't be looking at the latest and greatest flagship devices IMO.
Right now I've got a four year old Galaxy S5. It's a nice phone, meets all my requirements...might not be the easiest device to tear apart, but it does have a 5/10 repairability score on ifix it which isn't awful for a mobile phone (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S5+Teardown/24016). When I first put LineageOS on it there were some issues, but now that's all been worked out and it runs pretty well. Compatibility is usually going to be best on older devices, so for custom roms I'd suggest avoiding anything released within the past year -- or be ready to look very closely at the dev progress for that device. The other thing to consider is that without the bloatware, an older device is going to run just fine. In my experience, five year old hardware running LineageOS gets better performance than one year old hardware on a stock install. The biggest thing holding me back from getting a new phone right now is just that my current one, despite its age, still has literally nothing wrong with it. I'm tempted to try to repurpose it for something else, but I can't justify even $100 for a new phone when my current one is damn near flawless. And the new phone I'm looking at is an LG G5, which isn't exactly new...but the hardware is better than the S5, and the S5 *still* works well enough that I can't even find an excuse to convince myself that it doesn't.... :) So don't be afraid of buying an older device if it meets the rest of your requirements.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:16PM
Oh, forgot to add...as I said in my post, I quite enjoy the S5 (the default software is atrocious, but if you wipe it the hardware is pretty nice). But the brightness isn't going to quite meet your needs I'd expect. You can usually work around a screen that won't dim enough -- there's third-party apps that can dim it further although I don't think those give any power saving as I believe they just dim the image on screen rather than the backlight itself...but it's usable for night reading. The bigger issue is daylight...the S5 is usually readable, but it's a struggle, and if you've got sunglasses on it's pretty unreadable unless you find some shade. Last time I saw a device that actually performed well in daylight, it was a monochrome display where you could see each individual pixel...so if you want a big bright color display you might have issues there, although I'd expect tablets and laptops to do a bit better than phones if only because they have room for bigger lights and bigger batteries...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:22PM (1 child)
The original title was:
Admittedly that sounds kind of dumb, but I agree that "modern" often means crappier (more bloat, less control) in tech. I agree with the rest of the post, an older device may work just as well. Usually I get new phones because I lose/break it, but in the case of a tablet I don't really bring it anywhere so I still have one from like 5 years ago. Besides that the micro-usb port stopped working so I can no longer charge it (I ordered the part to give it one last chance), the only problem seems to be only 1 gb of ram which leads to trouble with some web browsing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 10 2018, @05:25PM
Oh yea, I forgot the other problem with that old tablet is the dim screen.