I'm looking for a cost-efficient tablet just to watch videos. So the most important things are:
- Great screen, at least 25cm (10") diameter, viewable at a reasonably wide angle (an angle similar to an average modern-day computer monitor)
- Smooth video playback
- WiFi (any type is fine, but prefer at least 802.11b)
- Sufficient battery life to play 2 hours of video non-stop
- Speakers that sound good for human voices (if they work good for TED talks, they will work good for all my uses, which does include a few TED talks). Stereo speakers would be real nice, but are not a hard requirement.
- Prefer something not too heavy, but I don't have specific weight requirements
Most of the videos are available on YouTube or YouTube clones. The rest of the videos are stored as files, which I can convert to any open format before temporarily placing them on the tablet to watch.
I don't need to store a whole bunch of videos on the tablet at any one time. The longest video that will be watched is likely 2 hours long. For anything longer, I can plug it in to a charger.
I'm completely open to any operating system, even obscure ones. Compatibility with any OS version is fine: I don't require compatibility with the "latest-and-greatest" OS version, as I'm just going to be using it to watch videos.
I don't have a specific price range in mind; I would simply like to spend as little as possible while meeting all the above requirements.
Leading up to this posting question, I bought an inexpensive tablet, and the screen was so awful I had to send the tablet back. The brightness of the screen was so low it was hard to see and you had to line up your eyes within a few degrees perpendicular to the plane of the screen to see the content. On top of that, the resolution was so bad I could easily see each pixel.
