Where can I find these brands?
Websites like Amazon and Ebay are full of devices like laptops and tablets for sale. Some are brand new, some are refurbished, some are by the most popular brands such as Apple, Samsung, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba etc but there are also many by unknown brands, particularly chinese ones at a much lower price.
How much cheaper are these brands?
These devices can often be half the price of more popular brand ones making them appear to be an attractive prospect at first glance, but what are the advantages and disadvantages?
Advantages?
Price – These obviously cost a lot less to start with.
Replacement – Being low cost to start with, these devices are often cheaper to replace than the cost of repair.
Disadvantages?
Build quality – Cheaper components are often used in the such devices and therefore not as robust or reliable. In the case of tablets these are often cheaper displays with poorer touchscreen quality or slower processors. Laptops are often built with cheaper components and with built in storage and ram which means little or no upgradability or if a motherboard fails, then data is usually lost too.
It is not uncommon for a manufacturer to make a batch of tablets all of the same model but each other to have different internal parts to all the others or for a device to be labelled as one model but in fact be a different one.
Performance – These devices are usually much lower specification and using cheaper components they will not run as efficiently and be less reliable.
Repairability – In the case of failed or damaged components, replacement parts can sometimes be very hard to obtain for these devices and when they are, given the initial cost of the device new it is often uneconomical to repair. In some cases, there may be a lack of support from the manufacturer with regards to things like software and drivers or spare parts in general.
What do you recommend?
If you are looking to purchase a cheap tablet or laptop for the children and high performance is not an issue, and you are not too worried at the fact that if it fails or gets damaged then a repair may not be straight forward or possible, or if budget is an issue then these cheaper brand tablets often fit the bill.
However, in the long run we would always recommend buying devices from well-known brands such as Apple, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo, Samsung etc for the many advantanges they offer.
These advantages are usually performance, quality of build, availability of spares and repairability and support from the manufacturer where needed.
The price of some of these brands are often much higher however there are still many refurbished devices out there available by these brands which would still outperform unknown brands for not much higher cost. However, that said there are still some excellent devices brand new such as the Amazon Fire tablets available for less than £100.