Anyone bought an android tablet from Gearbest or the like?

[ghostrider1971]

Evening all,

Question as per above, please

Any problems with functionality, customs charges etc?

Cheers

[jtc]

Nope and I'd be very hesitant tbh.
I've seen 10" Samsung A6 tablets going for around £150 on fleabay. Although used I'd rather have one of them than buying a tablet from GB. I use one myself and think they are great. Maybe someone could make me feel different on here but after buying crap like lenova in the past I feel I will stick with Samsung 😊

[Perpetua]

I'm also in the very wary camp . . . . largely because if anything goes wrong, then we all know what a palaver it can be returning vaping equipment to China.

Personally I'd rather pay a little more and buy within the UK, where there's a little more come back if things go botty up - which knowing my luck, it would!

[Get Off My Cloud]

Bought a cheap android phone from them about 18 months ago.
Still works fine but i am one of those people that never touches their phone other than to make or receive a phonecall so it's not loaded with a gazillion different apps and crap or getting used all day long.
I would say it depends on how much you are intending to spend, i bought the phone with the expectation that if it went up the spout after 3 or 4 months the cost of the phone per month wasn't something i would be crying over.

[marksixysix]

I have bought a few Xiaomi redmi android phones from GB over the years and had no problems at all.
If it goes missing then you are covered with paypal, the only down side is if it arrives faulty or develops a fault as it will be costly to send back so it's a bit of a gamble but for the most part I know a lot of people that buy tech from China and never have a problem.

What I will say is, make sure it is in stock, or look for when it will ship as some will be pre order items.
You can use a faster shipping service like DHL, but if you do, you will guarantee yourself customs fee's.
You a regular shipping method and it's possible to be nabbed by customs, but less likely.

Also check if the item ships from one of their EU warehouses. It will cost a little bit more but there will be no customs and if it is in stock, you should see the item inside a week.

[stu1873]

It would all depend on what size, specs and price you are looking for before you can narrow down on what and where to buy.

For a tablet the most important things for me would be the quality of the screen, decent Processor and enough RAM to cope with multitasking. battery life may also be important

I bought a cheapish phone from a Chinese vendor (Coolicool) last year after scouring the net for weeks on what would be the best phone and deal for me and i have not had any problems. I am sure they had an EU warehouse so no customs fees to worry about.

There are plenty of names that you probably have never heard of that are just as good as the big name brands, in fact quite a lot of the brands you have never heard of are part of the bigger companies and use some of the same parts.

[snow]

When tablets first made an appearance I couldn't afford a named brand or rather I was unwilling to pay big bucks for what I thought would turn out to be something I wouldn't use very much being a die hard desktop pc user, at the same time being a bit of a geek I wanted to try the latest thing so I bought a nobodys ever heard of Chinese 7" tablet from Amazon for a fraction of the price of a named brand. (At the time I hadn't heard of Gearbeast or Fasttech) I did spend a great deal of time comparing specs and asking around before picking the one I wanted and knew it would arrive with useless instructions etc. It was actually not bad for a first tablet - I still have it and it still works albeit that these days its clunky and slowwwww compared to the latest tech so it's been sitting in a cupboard for a couple of years now - ever since I got a smart phone which did the same thing but faster and better. Rather than buy direct maybe have a look at cheap tablets from Amazon which gives you more protection.

[stu1873]

What is your budget ghostrider1971?
What size of screen would you prefer?

[ghostrider1971]

stu1873 - I have a Samsung that I use for myself - I was thinking of getting a 7" tablet for my little daughter - just something to watch Peppa Pig and the like

[stu1873]

Budget?

[ghostrider1971]

stu1873 - Flexible but thinking of looking around 50 quid or so - have seen the Amazon Kindle Fire as an option

[bioxx]

This thread is very interesting to me. For a long time now I’ve been looking......for a reason to get a tablet. I get the gearbest newsletter and there’re always those tempting adverts but the problem is I don’t really need one. If it were a shiny I wouldn’t hesitate that long.

[ghostrider1971]

bioxx - I'm absoloutely the same

I have seen tablets on GB for around 30 quid - they look OK too - for that price they won't be anything special, but if they do the business - that's great.

Would also prefer not to buy from the Luxembourg tax dodgers if I can - I watched the BBC Panorama again yesterday on how they treat their warehouse staff - absolutely disgusting

[snow]

Oh if its for a child I highly recommend the Fire - the kids edition is superb my 4 year old grandson has had his for well over a year now and its used by him daily - its also great for in the car and they do honour the no questions asked replacement guarantee as they had to replace his when he dropped it plus the free membership to Amazon kids is great. However thats a bit out of your budget at £99 BUT they are doing the 7" Adult version of the Fire for £49 at the moment.

[stu1873]

I have the Amazon Fire HD10 and for the price i got it for (Prime Day sale) it is very good value.

The Fire 7 only has 1GB of ram but if it is just for watching YouTube and playing some games it will be ideal for kids. The screen isn't HD but at 7" you won't see much of a difference between HD and non HD tbh. I bought my nephew the Kids Fire 7 at christmas time and he loves it.

The Amazon tablets do not come with Google Play but it is easy to manually put on yourself and takes under 10mins to do. They also sneakily sell them with adverts but you can usually just call them up and say you have mistakenly bought it thinking it didn't come with adds and they are annoying you, they sometimes remove them for free. If they want you to pay to remove them there is a way to do it for free but it involves debugging through a PC to change some command prompts (plenty of guides on youtubeto do this).