The Best Tablets, According to the Reviews

Buy the iPad Air if you want the safe answer, and the OnePlus Pad Go 2 if the price matters at all. The $399.99 OnePlus outscores the $1,199 Samsung on this page, 8.3 against 8.0, from three published scores each. It is not the better tablet in every respect and the section below says where it is not. But it is a third of the money for a higher average.

The three, at a glance

	Review consensus	Price	Best at	The catch
Apple iPad Air (M3)	8.7 — one outlet cooler	—	Being the sensible default	Superseded by the M4, below
OnePlus Pad Go 2	8.3 — one dissenter	$399.99	Battery, and the price	Android tablet apps; 33W charging
Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra	8.0 — genuinely contested	$1,199	That 14.6-inch screen	Mid-range chip, premium price

Consensus averages three published scores per tablet, normalised to ten. Prices are list prices read on 2 September 2026, sourced above. The “best at” column is ours, read off what those reviewers found.

The pattern, and where it breaks

Something shows up across these lists often enough to be worth naming — though not as often as we first claimed, and the correction is the interesting part.

Of the six bitcritiq shortlists carrying both a budget pick and a flagship pick, the budget one matches or beats the flagship in four: laptops, mini PCs, soundbars and now tablets. In the other two — robot vacuums and smartwatches — the expensive machine wins outright, and by a clear margin in the vacuums.

That is not reviewers being contrarian. It is what happens when a category matures: the expensive product still wins on the specification sheet, and the cheap one has become good enough that reviewers stop marking it down for what it lacks. Where the flagship still wins, the category is one where the hardware is genuinely still improving.

The caveat matters as much as the finding. An average is one number, and it flattens exactly the things people pay extra for — the Samsung’s screen really is better than the OnePlus’s, and no averaged score will tell you whether that is worth $800 to you. What the pattern does tell you is that the floor has risen far more than the ceiling has, and that buying the dearest thing in a category is no longer a shortcut to buying the best-reviewed one.

Apple has already replaced our top pick

The iPad Air on this page is the M3. Apple launched the M4 iPad Air on 11 March 2026, and it is the model Apple now sells at the URL our price used to point at. That is our error, and this section is the correction rather than a quiet edit.

What changed: an 8-core CPU and 9-core GPU, up to 30% faster than the M3, 12GB of memory instead of 8GB, and Wi-Fi 7 — at the same starting price the M3 held. Unlike the Galaxy Watch case elsewhere on this site, where the newer model scored lower and cost more, there is no argument here for the older machine except availability and discount.

Why the M3 is still the pick on this page, for now. Our threshold is three published outlet scores for the same model, and the M4 has not yet accumulated them — TechRadar has reviewed it, but a shortlist entry needs three. It will replace the M3 here the moment a third outlet scores it, and until then this section is the honest version of what we know: the pick is a generation behind, the successor is better at the same price, and the reason it is not listed is a gap in the evidence rather than a judgement about the product.

The price has been removed from the M3 entry. The $749 we were showing is what Apple charges for the M4, and attaching it to the older model stated something false. It comes back when we have a current figure for the machine actually named.

Where the money actually goes on a tablet

• Accessories are not a rounding error. A keyboard and a stylus can add several hundred dollars, and on the iPad Air both are sold separately. Price the tablet you will actually use, not the one in the box.
• Storage is the upgrade you cannot undo. No tablet here takes a memory card for app storage, so the tier you buy is the tier you keep.
• The screen is the thing you touch for years. It is the one place where the Samsung’s price makes sense, and the one spec that no software update improves.
• Ecosystem beats specification. If your phone is an iPhone, the iPad does things no Android tablet will. If it is not, the reverse is less true but still real.

On a tablet the accessories and the storage tier are where the real money goes, and neither is visible in a review score.

If you are buying a first tablet for someone else, the OnePlus is the low-risk gift: it costs least, lasts longest between charges, and asks nothing about which phone they already own. Our laptop shortlist covers the next question up, and what to spend on in a laptop sale applies the same reasoning to a bigger purchase.