I Bought an Android Tablet for 3,600 Yen

2025-06-23

AliExpress was having a summer sale.

I was casually browsing for something interesting and came across an Android tablet priced at just 3,600 yen (about $22 USD).

At that price, even if it turned out to be junk, I figured it would be worth the risk—so I bought it.

As of writing, its original price was listed as 6,556 yen, which is incredibly cheap.

Even among the many Chinese tablets on Amazon, this one stood out for its low price.

Interestingly, it’s also available on Amazon Japan:

So, here are the specs:

On paper, the specs aren’t bad at all.

And after booting it up, everything matched what was advertised.

Here’s my breakdown of the pros, the okay stuff, and the drawbacks.

Pros

Obviously. No complaints here.

Under 500g — surprisingly light. Very portable.

It’s not hollow or tinny. Not great either, but acceptable for casual video watching.

App performance is fine when used one at a time. YouTube runs pretty smoothly.

But it struggles when multitasking—for example, using split-screen to read Kindle while watching YouTube gets laggy.

The resolution could be better, but honestly, it’s doing well for this price range.

This is a big one for me. It seems like the OS has been heavily modified in weird ways.

In particular, the recent apps menu behaves oddly—it feels like the default Android behavior has been overridden in a not-so-great way.

The battery seems to drain unusually quickly. I’ll need to use it more, but so far, it doesn’t look promising.

This is common with budget Chinese tablets—probably a cost-cutting measure.

For 3,600 yen, I’m pretty satisfied.

But if you have a 10,000 yen budget, you could definitely get something better.

Still, if you’re comparing this to the Fire HD 10 which costs around 20,000 yen, I’d say a cheap Chinese tablet like this is a better deal.