Thanksgiving and Black Friday are just around the corner, which means it’s time to spend that hard-earned cash. While I’m still waiting to see if there is some deals to be had on the days of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, I picked up a Samsung Galaxy Tab A 10.1 tablet for my parents, and here are just some quick initial thoughts.

I actually bought a Galaxy Tab A 10.1 for my parents 3 years ago. The reason I bought another one is because both of my parents want a larger tablet, and the Nexus 7 from 2013 was getting a bit long in the tooth. Like the 2016 edition, the 2019 Tab A is an Android tablet with a 10.1 inch 1920*1200 screen, and the form factor is still pretty similar.


The 2019 edition does have some upgrades and improvements: it is sightly thinner and lighter than the predecessor, and now has a metal back to give it a little more upscale feel. The gold unit I bought looks pretty good. To keep up with modern times, the 2019 edition also has a USB-C plug instead of the micro-USB. The other physical differences are that there is no more physical home button, and the location of the rear camera is now in the upper left corner rather than the center of upper side.

The 2019 Tab A of course has some refreshed hardware inside. Most notable is that it has more RAM and a front facing camera with more megapixels. The unit I bought also has 128 GB of storage, vs. the 16 GB of the 2016 unit. Full spec comparison can be found here.

The Galaxy Tab A is Samsung’s value tablet line, so it doesn’t have top of the line hardware, However, it was plenty snappy for casual use. Setup was easy and moving the data and copying apps from the old tablet to the new one is pretty seamless thanks to Google. Hopefully my parents will get some good use out of their new tablet.