Walmart quietly release new Onn Pro tablets

Last year Walmart introduced a new line of products, the Onn Tablet. Available in both 8 inch and 10.1-inch variants, it was an attempt to make a decent functioning Android tablet at an impulse purchase price point. Originally coming in at $79 for the 10.1 inch version and just $64 for the 8 Inch version, these were obviously never going to feature cutting edge components or industry-leading build quality, but they are still adequate for basic tasks, and a step up from many of the cheaper tablets on the market.

These were not just sold by Walmart, but also manufactured by them. They clearly saw an opportunity to create a product that would appeal to customers by being cheap but reliable, and using their massive scale was able to pass on the savings to the end-user.

This product line seems to have been somewhat of a success because newly introduced are two updated versions of these tablets. Available now are the Onn 8″ Tablet Pro and Onn 10.1″ Tablet Pro. The “Pro” revisions offer a spec boost and a few other tweaks to entice users. They have bumped the prices up a little, but they’re still very competitive devices, and still firmly in the budget price range.

We wouldn’t recommend these tablets to anyone who wants a top-spec experience, anyone who does a lot of high-end gaming on their tablet, or anyone who enjoys devices made with premium materials and industry-leading design. They are instead basic functional devices built to offer a decent experience at a mass-market price. If you just want a tablet for checking emails, watching videos, sending messages, and other tasks that aren’t particularly hardware taxing, these could be great options. They would also be a solid choice for a child’s first tablet, where you wouldn’t be too upset if it got broken or lost.

For the entry-level 8 inch tablet, Walmart has doubled the built-in storage from 16GB to 32GB, and it still features a Micro SD card for storage expansion. The CPU has also seen a significant upgrade, going from a 1.3 GHz Quad-Core processor to a 2.0 GHz Octa-core processor in this new Pro version. The quoted battery life of the device has increased from 5.5 hours to 10 hours, although we’d like to test that for ourselves before confirming that kind of improvement. The final biggest change is switching over to the more modern USB-C charging format, which begs the question that if a tablet with a laser focus on value can offer this, what excuses do other device manufacturers have?

The Onn 8″ Tablet Pro is available today exclusively from Walmart for $99.

The larger sibling of the Onn 8 Inch Tablet. This receives the same storage upgrade, from 16GB to 32GB, and the same CPU upgrade from a 1.3 GHz Quad-Core processor to a 2.0 GHz Octa-core processor in the new Pro version. They also went to the effort of increasing the RAM offered by this Pro version, up to 3GB of RAM from 2GB in the original. Walmart claims that the battery life here has also increased from 5.5 hours to 10 hours, but we’d like to see how they actually hold up in real-world usage to see how accurate that is. They’ve also replaced the dated Micro USB port on the original 10 Inch model to a USB-C port for this Pro iteration, and we couldn’t be happier with that change.

The Onn 10.1″ Tablet Pro is available today exclusively from Walmart for $129.

The single biggest difference between these two tablets is the size, and then, of course, the difference in price. They’re both modestly capable machines for their respective price points, so if you’re getting one, the best advice is to opt for whichever size you prefer.

These are devices that can easily be compared with Amazon’s Fire HD tablets, which just had new iterations announced for 2020. They’re in very similar pricing territory, they’re both examples of a retail giant turning their attention to manufacturing technology, and using their scale to drill retail pricing down as low as possible for end-users. I’d say that the new Amazon Fire HD 8 offers slightly better hardware for the money, but you’re going to be heavily tied into Amazon’s ecosystem for everything you do with the tablet, as it does not offer standard Android out of the box, instead opting for Amazon’s custom “FireOS” fork.

The Onn Pro tablets offer similar but not quite as capable hardware as the Kindle Fire equivalents, but their advantage is a stock build of Android, with Google Play readily available out of the box. There are a few bundled apps that will be easy enough to ignore, but for the most part, you can expect a similar experience to any other Android device you use.

Let us know if you decide to go for either of these tablets or which you think are better value between the Onn Pro tablets and the new Kindle Fire tablets.