The budget tablet rant.

Back in December I received a $80 RCA Viking II tablet. At the time I had an aging iPad 2. It is fine for my needs. I currently still have it. Many people say that you need to put down $500 or more for a tablet. I don't, even if it is a second-hand iPad around $100, it is easily worth it.
For the most part, I can get by with a cheap Android tablet, even if they break every few months or have bad battery life or inaccurate readouts on the temperature or time remaining until flat, but they can also be slow at tasks like powering through videos or webpages (don't get me started on games like Angry Birds or Minecraft)

However, don't expect killer performance from a budget tablet, because the standard is 1 GB of RAM (512 MB on an Android 4.4 tablet) And generally a cheap MediaTek processor or similar, and some lack components you would expect to come standard, like a micro USB cable for syncing to a PC or a back camera (a decent amount of RCA and other Chinese tablets lack rear-facing cameras.) But then there is the question of "what about the Amazon Fire" overall the new model is the best in its category, just buy the 16 GB model without offers (offers are lock screen ads that you can pay to get rid of, but aren't really worth it in the end.) However, if you are wanting a higher quality tablet (to replace your laptop for travel) you can look into a used Apple iPad (stick to the iPad 4 or newer for application compatibility) or a Chromebook which runs Google's Chrome OS and is just now getting Android app support out of the box, and some Chromebooks are 2in1 laptops where you can use the screen as a touch screen. However, stay away from the cheap Windows tablets, even if they seem compelling, just buy a second hand netbook (like a Toshiba NB305 or HP Mini) for about $50 and you will get anywhere from 32 GB of storage to 256 GB of storage, and then a new battery runs about $5-$40 and another GB of RAM runs about $20.