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· Premium Member
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A lot of my family are outdoorsy and when we give gifts they are usually outdoor related, knives, guns, radios or other functional life stuff. This year I want to give out some tablets with a survival library and a way to charge them off grid. I have been picking up older Kindle Fires for 15 bucks at thrift stores for a while and usually give them to friends for their kids to watch movies on or if they are like me survival stuff, got some off brand 32Gb internal storage android a few years ago for 20 bucks that worked good. They all work well and some have sd slots that make it easy to load up a card and put a library on there. What I'm looking at now is what some others have experienced. We have one of the kindle paperwhites from years ago and I watched my kid use it for 3 days straight and it was still at 70% battery life without charging. So the questions come to:

1. What is the best for the budget as far as price?
2. Battery charge, how long it lasts?
3. Battery charge, how long it takes?
4. Internal storage space .vs SD card or not?
5. Proprietary software/OS?
6. Screen backlit or not?
7. Ease of taking apart to charge or connect directly to cabling and external battery?(this one is a true worst case).
8. Any other concerns.

Looking to keep prices for each well under $50, unless it is new and can start fires with it's reflection... I am using a Samsung Tab A 2018 7 inch and the battery lasts a few days with casual use and charges in about an hour to full. On solar charge it takes about 6 hours from zero to 100% not directly in sun. Another thought is making a tablet for others will not be as large as mine for storage, I am only at 28Gb and some of that is specific video how to where as for others might just hit the basic survival stuff. I am also looking at a cheap windup radio charger for $24 ea that does weather AM/FM solar and wind as well as usb charge. I use an ETON and it's amazing, my wife got one of the cheap $24 ones and it's ok, but wind charging is a PITA, is is supposed to do battery dump charging, but we can't get that to work right. I'm mainly looking at used stuff for the tablets. The verizon ellipsis 7 works really good, I had 3 of them from years ago and was able to get kindle and adobe on there with ease. Haven't put them through the ringer yet on battery life. My 11 year old has 3 iPad 2 that she is constantly charging and at 8Gb they aren't the best, but I can find them for 10 bucks quite often at thrift stores, outdated OS, no expansion, battery life is crap, only advantage is the larger screen, not a huge fan of Apple to start with, they are famous for forcing out their tech with OS upgrades and the older stuff the charging cables cost more than the device. let me know what some of you have had luck with.
 

· Michigander
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1,900 Posts
Don't overlook the basic Kindle app.
Works great on phone, although phones are not good viewing in direct sunlight.
SD cards are better than internal memory, more options.

I'd download the APK for Android, then you have it, so you can put it on a phone even if there is no cell service. Here's a link for that. I don't know about iPhone stuff.
 
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