Samsung Galaxy Tab A11 8.7" 11 Silver 2025

The Galaxy Tab A11 pairs a surprisingly fast processor with a genuinely bad screen. It's fine for kids or as a secondary beater tablet, but the dim, low-res display makes it tough to recommend for anyone who plans to read, watch movies, or get work done. You can get much better screens for similar money elsewhere.

The Mediatek Helio G99 chip is a genuine bright spot here, landing in the 85th percentile for CPUs. It keeps the interface snappy and handles light gaming without a fuss. That smooth 90Hz refresh rate helps, too. But the rest of the hardware holds it back. With only 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, multitasking gets tight fast, and the 1340x800 TFT display is a real letdown. It's one of the dimmest, lowest-res panels we've seen on a modern tablet, making text look soft and colors feel washed out.

Stacked against the Apple iPad A16, the Tab A11 gets absolutely crushed on screen quality and overall app ecosystem, though it costs a fraction of the price. The Xiaomi Pad 7 and Lenovo Idea Tab Pro both offer vastly superior displays and more RAM for not a whole lot more money, making them much better choices for media consumption. This Samsung only really makes sense against no-name brands like the UMIDIGI Active T1, where it wins on processor speed and software polish, but still loses on screen resolution.

For the $135 to $184 street price, you're getting a snappy processor in a nice-looking body, but you're paying for it with a truly subpar screen. If your main use case is handing it to a kid for YouTube Kids or using it as a dedicated recipe reader in the kitchen, the value is there. For anything involving reading long articles, watching movies, or doing work, the display is a dealbreaker that makes it feel overpriced.

The Galaxy Tab A11 is Samsung's latest swing at the budget tablet market, and it's a bit of a mixed bag. It borrows some design cues from the pricier Galaxy S phones, so it looks and feels more premium than its price tag suggests. But once you turn it on, that 8.7-inch screen immediately reminds you where the corners were cut.

Skip this if you plan to read e-books, edit documents, or watch movies as your main activity. The low-resolution TFT screen makes text fuzzy and video look soft, and it's a constant eyesore. If screen quality matters at all, look at the Xiaomi Pad 7 or a used iPad instead.

The Galaxy Tab A11 is a tablet with a split personality. It has a great processor for the price, wrapped in a body with one of the worst screens we've seen. It's a decent pick as a secondary device for kids or casual video streaming where image quality isn't a priority. For anyone who actually wants to enjoy looking at the screen, you should keep saving your pennies.