Best Early Prime Day Tablet Deals: Save Now on iPads, Amazon Fire, Samsung Tabs

As Prime Day draws near, we’re diving deep into Amazon’s offerings to find the biggest discounts on lots of different kinds of products. If you’ve been putting off getting a new tablet, there is a wide variety of choices available, from bare-bones Amazon Fires to impossibly powerful gamer-focused slates from Asus. Here are six of the sweetest early Prime Day tablet deals.

Tablets have evolved into powerful and convenient computing machines, great for streaming media, exploring your creativity, or just surfing the internet. There’s a price and form factor for just about every need, with Apple leading the pack as usual. But if you’re not interested in the Cupertino vibe, Amazon has deals on its own Fire tabs, Samsung’s Android-based units, and more.

(Credit: Steven Winkelman)

Apple iPad 64GB Wi-Fi Retina Tablet (2021)

The 9th generation iPad doesn’t deliver any big surprises, as we noted in our review, but it doesn’t need to. By this point, Apple’s tablet is a known quantity, delivering high-end performance and crisp screen resolution at a surprisingly affordable price. This version pumps up the engine by upgrading to a A13 Bionic core, which performed spectacularly on all of our benchmark tests. Apple also upgraded the front-facing camera to 12MP for better video call quality. This was already a great deal, but an additional price drop makes it a no-brainer.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Apple iPad Air 10.9″ M1 64GB Tablet (5th Gen)

Creative types flock to the iPad Air for its combination of light form factor, powerful performance and affordability. In our Editors’ Choice review, we said it boasted a “nearly perfect balance of features and performance.” The 2,360-by-1,640-pixel screen is brighter and richer than a standard iPad, with less glare, and supports the second-generation Apple Pencil for precise input controls. This is a great tablet that can fill a number of niches in your household, from schoolwork to streaming.

Amazon Fire HD 10 64GB Tablet (2021 Release)

Amazon’s Fire tablet line took a little bit to get up to snuff, as their focus on affordability came at the cost of cutting-edge performance. But as we noted in our review, the HD 10 Fire is a zippy little machine with decent performance, as long as you’re looped in to the Amazon ecosystem. For media consumption and mobile gaming, this is a solid option, as the screen has nice, deep colors and the MediaTek Helio P60T processor delivers smooth, stutter-free computing, including a new split-screen feature. At this price, the Fire HD 10 is a steal.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite 10.4″ 64GB Tablet
(Credit: Amazon)

Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite 10.4″ 64GB Tablet

If you’re an Android evangelist—and plenty of us here are—there are solid options for tablet computing at a budget. Getting a hundred bucks off of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S6 Lite(Opens in a new window) is one of them. In our review, we called it “the best way to get an active stylus tablet at a relatively low cost.” Samsung’s included S Pen is both pressure and tilt sensitive, giving you a wide range of expression. Build quality is also extremely solid, and although the processor isn’t terribly beefy, it runs Photoshop Express, Autodesk Sketchbook, and similar apps without a hiccup.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S8
(Credit: Amazon)

Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 11” 128GB WiFi 6E Tablet

We deemed the S8 the “best high-end Android tablet you can buy” in our review, so if performance is your main goal this is the tablet to get. The smallest form factor in Samsung’s tablet lineup, there is still a lot of power under the hood of the S8. The sharp, clear LCD screen boasts a 120Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling and responsiveness to the included S Pen. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor works hard and battery life is solid—over 7 hours of video playback at full brightness on a single charge. The new Dex productivity mode lets you enable a windowed mode for a more traditional Android OS experience.

ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (2022) 13.4″ Gaming Laptop Tablet
(Credit: Amazon)

Asus ROG Flow Z13 Intel i5 16GB RAM 512GB SSD 13.4” Gaming Tablet w/ Keyboard

This is a bit of a niche product, as we pointed out in our review, but it’s also a beefy machine with some serious specs. The Asus ROG Flow Z13(Opens in a new window) is a tablet-first device with a detachable keyboard, and it features a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU and high-refresh screen for hardcore gamers. The Core i9 processor—way more powerful than anything we normally see in this form factor—lets it run a variety of software smoothly, although the latest envelope-pushing games might struggle. That’s fine, because this is a tablet. It’s also compatible with Asus’s XG Mobile external GPU device for even better graphics. The price is high, but the performance earns it. And at $300 off, it’s virtually a bargain.