Not even 40£...

It says in the description " Android 5 operating system." so I guess you do not need to upgrade them :wink:

N7 might not still be manufactured but they are still being sold for about 100£ (Argos for example had them for 98£ recently) and honestly it is still the best device for money you can get for what you described. (I own 2 and a fire and if you want to watch anything on it go for N7, the screen on the fire is really low res and while it has good colors and viewing angles, being an IPS one it is noticeably low res.) If you want to browse the net, read, watch movies go for N7 it is simpler and much much better (worth the extra over fire imo). Fire is great for kids or as a remote or as a device to play games.

Just an advice that will help you in googling, in Android world "jailbreaking" is called "rooting".

To get the play store installed in addition to amazon one you don't need to root, just follow a very brief and simple tutorial set by "root junky" to whose YouTube video I link.

If you want to get rid of amazon stuff and put cm 12.1 on the fire, you do need to root. (99% of the time if you develop a fault on Android, you can revert to stock rom and hide the root so you can send it for warranty repair).

The tutorial for this is 15 minutes long and presumes no previous knowledge of rooting or anything (this is if you are on 5.0.1, so if you didn't let it update after you received it). http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4dwguHoxTvo

In general if you don't mind you can pick up N7 2013 for 50-70£ refurb/used (I got a 16GB from Amazon warehouse, very good for 54£, so that might be worth a check.) And I would say that is your best bet.

Fire with fire OS is sluggish and unintuitive but it does work well compared to other similar offerings while fire with cm 12.1 is much faster and in general on a new level,especially if you like to play around with it.

Hope it helps

And it takes you 5 minutes following an online tutorial to make them play store-ish and remove ads on the process. It takes you further 10 minutes to put cyanogenmod on it which works like a charm.
(a small piece of advice, stop the tablet from getting OTA updates, the flashing of cm12 is much easier if you are on 5.0.1).

Now £49

49.99 now.

Received mine two days agoWas the 20F model so no Android 5 yet, but I couldn't be bothered returning to Argos. It was sealed inside the original Lenovo box, with a 'Refurbished' sticker on the outside. On opening it I really couldn't tell the difference with a brand new item. The unit looked new, no scratches or other signs of use at all.

Been using it for a couple of days and I must say it is a pretty decent tablet for the money. The IPS screen is very, very good - bright, with punchy colours and good contrast, excellent touch response.
YouTube and Netflix videos look superb. 1024 x 600 is not a high resolution but on a 7 inch screen it's more than acceptable.
I'm quite amazed by the battery life, but that appears to be the case with most Mediatek devices. Have had about 4h use of screen time with about 40h on standby and the battery is still at 70%. It's not a speed demon, Chrome does stutter a bit with some pages but is perfectly usable.
Sound is good, the Dolby enhancements do appear to impact the quality of output through the headphones, not so much through the speakers. Really can't tell the difference playing a HQ Spotify stream through my Soundmagic E10s on this vs my wife's Ipad Mini 2. Must be using a decent DAC.

All in all for £40 it is fantastic value for money.

Update on the SD Card issue, factory reset which reinstalled Lollipop with the card in this time and it seems to be storing some App data as well as all downloads, images etc on the SD Card. Although I had changed the Default Write Disk to SD Card it wasn't working for some reason before. All OK now although with some Apps you don't save much (or sometimes any) space by sending to SD Card.

Well done Argos. They've sent me a bad cable. Tried about 2 other ones. One works while the other does not. Still trying to inderstand if it's tablet related or cable related

Thanks for the detailed explanation.
Mine looked new but does not actually charge... It shows the charging sign for a few seconds and then back on battery.
Could this be os bug or hardware.
Really like it and I hope I don't need to RMA IT

Got the a7-30f. Reviews show the 30f as having 3g. Is yours 3g?
Thanks

Ok one major annoyance on this. As we know it's only 8GB and leaves under 4GB for your Apps and Data. Put in an SD Card and although you can move some Apps to SD card through the Apps menu they don't really get moved there. They get moved to a "virtual" SD card that is part of your internal memory. So it won't save any of that 4GB. Apparently this is a common Android issue - although my phone running a Huawei version of KitKat can move Apps to the External SD Card. If anyone has any luck with moving Apps to external SD please let me know.

Sorry I've not really been looking at 10 inch tablets, just happened to see that one at Tesco.

The Lenovo 7inch has arrived (left on the doorstep this afternoon - good old Royal Mail). 4.4.2 but was able to upgrade to Lollipop. The box has the model number on the outside, if it's A7-20F it can't be upgraded (yet). So if it's important don't open it, ask if you can return it. Mine was A7-30F so was lucky there.

So far it seems very impressive indeed, certainly compared to my son's current tablet which was bought in March 2012, it's a world apart from that.

these are showing £49.99 .....am I missing something?

​Thanks. Any recommendations if I'm willing to spend more, around 120 ish?

You could try Hipstreet 10inch from Tesco £59.99. It has HDMI out. Good reviews on Tesco site but not so good on Amazon (US).

Received mine also today and had Android 5.0 installed not 4.4. Seems to be working fine so far.

​I agree but that's yet another thing to teach him to use. He's 70! Would rather just spend a bit more on a tablet! Ideally 10 inch. Decent resolution and speed and hdmi out... Must be one out there for me!

Mileage may vary but received mine this morning, had Kitkat installed but immediately offered Android 5.0 to update. All installed and working fine,

Not even brand new...

That is a bit annoying. But I find these days I never connect a tablet to a TV via HDMI, at least not for streaming channels. I now think it's much better to use a cheap device (such as NowTV) that supports the channels you need and that comes with a remote and is designed specifically to connect to a TV. So no need to be fiddling around with the tablet connected via a long cable running across your living room every time you want to pause the programme. I think you can get apps to use your smartphone as a remote but I didn't find them easy to use.

Does anyone know what the sound is like on these? I bought a Lenovo Miix 300 and the volume is too low for me with or without head phones, if anyone could advise me how to boost the volume I'd be happy to hear from them.

​That's so annoying! Need one for my father in law but needs to be able to connect to a TV, he's used to cable now, teaching him to cast etc would be a pia!

So many of these tablets come without a hdmi out now

Woeful device (unless you think the year is 2007). You wouldn't even use a bargepole to touch a phone with those sort of specs, so why would you want a 7" tablet with them?

7 inch screen.
Resolution 1024 x 600 pixels.
1.3GHz MediaTek 8127 quad core processor.
1GB RAM.
8 GB internal storage

You would be mad to spend £40 on a refurb of one of these yet not pay another £60 and get say the Smart Ultra 6 instead.

I bought one of these refurbs from Argos Outlet last October to give to my daughter for Christmas. She had less than 2 months use before the display panel cracked. The covering glass touchscreen is fine and my daughter is convinced it wasn't dropped. The tablet went back to Argos' contract repair company who returned it a week later saying that the cracked screen isn't covered under manufacturer's warranty. I'm just about to get back to Argos but I'd be very wary about buying a Lenovo tablet or another brand from Argos again if such an integral internal component is excluded from warranty.

Thanks OP

Eh? Tablets have existed for ages and well before 2007. It's not only Google that makes tablets. What do you think the Apple NewtonPad was? Or the Palm Pilots in the 90s? And what about the Windows Tablet? Hell, even Compaq had the TC1000, a touchscreen tablet with a detachable keyboard and that was 2003! And it still had a higher resolution than this Lenovo device!

I have a Linx 7 and in all honesty it's far too small and fiddly to run in desktop mode. The battery life is also poor. Android is a far better os for tablets.

I've spent quite a bit of time the last 2 days looking for a decent spec tablet from a reputable supplier/manufacturer UK supplied 12 month guarantee under £50. This is a better deal than I was able to find anyone criticising the spec should post a link to something better for the same price.

8gb....ew

I bought a Tab2 A7 from Very in December & as soon as I turned it on was offered 5.0.1 are the 8gb & 16gb that different as can only see that storage is the difference between them

Anyone know what courier Argos use?

It was somewhat more than that when it first came out.

Thanks OP, just ordered. I've been looking for a replacement for my son's tablet - cheap Chinese import but lasted 3 years, this should be ideal for the latest games that don't work on his current one.

Have you been looking at my browser history?

I have a Lynx 7 (cost the same as this). I find the screen fine with Win 10 and battery life is not too bad either. It is a bit more of a grown up machine than is this one, but it just depends what the user wants to do with it.

good tablet at the price

Got this deal a while back for my daughter, didn't expect a lot but its a great little tab for the money. Battery lasts a while but the best thing is the SD slot allowing you to have a load of TV shows and films on hand.

How this compares with Linx 7 apart from it being Windows?

got one of the last ones. great bday pressie for the Mrs. thanks OP!

Great tablet for mum to chat on skype and check e-mails ...

Not even 720p

It does - thank you very much. Top pointers regarding Nexus 7 - will investigate further.

I am planning of using tablet for browsing, streaming and probably working. I suppose Linx is a better Choice for that + 32GB of storage. Will have to wait for price of Linx to drop again by the looks of it :smiley:

There is in general a myth that flashing roms and building computers is hard for not tech savvy but I can't disagree more.

Both are nothing more than go ogling a bit and doing some "research", and your reward is that you learn a couple of interesting new stuff.

For example for this fire, getting cm 12.1 on it takes you 15 minutes following a step by step tutorial. No prerequisite knowledge required. You knight want to read about a further 45 minutes to get a feeling for what you are doing, but this is not essential.

In reality, I have never bricked a device. In order to do so you need to be either very unlucky or do something stupid - such as trying flashing incompatible roms not following the guidance provided by others who succeeded in it, or just try to do stuff that hasn't been done before - and that is what is hard and requires more knowledge and effort. (I have never met a person who got a bricked device and that it want their fault, I saved a couple of friends devices when they "bricked" them and you always need to find out what they did, it is often that they swap a step in a tutorial or simply flash wrong rom or some such. Of course not one of them came and said, "it is my fault", but blamed the tutorial, luck or something else.

Yes it is not 100% idi*t-proof like most stuff these days but if you follow the rules carefully you will be fine. Not much dissimilar to driving a car, in fact driving a car is much harder... If you follow the rules, unless you are unlucky you should be fine, but if you start driving in the wrong Lane, suddenly you are asking for trouble.

N7 might not still be manufactured but they are still being sold for about 100£ (Argos for example had them for 98£ recently) and honestly it is still the best device for money you can get for what you described. (I own 2 and a fire and if you want to watch anything on it go for N7, the screen on the fire is really low res and while it has good colors and viewing angles, being an IPS one it is noticeably low res.) If you want to browse the net, read, watch movies go for N7 it is simpler and much much better (worth the extra over fire imo). Fire is great for kids or as a remote or as a device to play games.

Just an advice that will help you in googling, in Android world "jailbreaking" is called "rooting".

To get the play store installed in addition to amazon one you don't need to root, just follow a very brief and simple tutorial set by "root junky" to whose YouTube video I link.

If you want to get rid of amazon stuff and put cm 12.1 on the fire, you do need to root. (99% of the time if you develop a fault on Android, you can revert to stock rom and hide the root so you can send it for warranty repair).

The tutorial for this is 15 minutes long and presumes no previous knowledge of rooting or anything (this is if you are on 5.0.1, so if you didn't let it update after you received it). http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4dwguHoxTvo

In general if you don't mind you can pick up N7 2013 for 50-70£ refurb/used (I got a 16GB from Amazon warehouse, very good for 54£, so that might be worth a check.) And I would say that is your best bet.

Fire with fire OS is sluggish and unintuitive but it does work well compared to other similar offerings while fire with cm 12.1 is much faster and in general on a new level,especially if you like to play around with it.

Hope it helps

Performance I'd say the Linx. Unsure about battery.

In terms of performance and battery, that's the main concern for me.

Description for this listing needs correcting. Here is what you get when going to the link...

Operating System: Android 4.4.x KitKat

The Android level is quite important for many folk.

Yeah Nexusfifth, I`m sure it is easy for YOU and a host of others, but not everyone is as tech-savvy, or prepared to brick their devices. But I accept that it`s possible to convert.

Forgive the hijack, but I would like a cheap-but-not-**** Android tablet pretty much for Chromecasting stuff - from Play Music, Spotify, Netflix - but understand Fires don't out of the box. Are you saying there's a workaround to get rid of all the Amazon nonsense and make them play ball with actual Android? (If only Tesco still did Hudls, or if the Nexus 7 was still manufactured - either one of those would have been ideal!) Also would a Fire have to be jailbroken to do this? (Sky Go viewing on the tablet itself would be another use-case - but it won't work on rooted/jailbroken devices.)
Any pointers gratefully received!

thanks

And it takes you 5 minutes following an online tutorial to make them play store-ish and remove ads on the process. It takes you further 10 minutes to put cyanogenmod on it which works like a charm.
(a small piece of advice, stop the tablet from getting OTA updates, the flashing of cm12 is much easier if you are on 5.0.1).

Okay, OKAY! I meant the Fire series are Google-less, so no Play Store apps etc.

You can collect collect 4x nectar points for the ebay purchase.

Even better than the Amazon Fire 7, as this runs Android :smirk:

See here from last month, I sent mine back.
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/lenovo-tab-2-a7-7-inch-quad-core-8gb-android-5-lollipop-refurb-44-99-argos-ebay-2387745?page=2#comments

Note, these are the models which are NOT upgradable to Andriod 5.

I've got one of these - great little tablet

Good reviews, not even a 720p screen but at this price point one shouldn't complain.
Heated.

Great bargain, cheapest yet for this. I love them.

Not a bad little tablet , I have test driven one of these , it performed fairly well , as a chill out tab !