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[Sirus]

To expand on the thread title, my old tablet has reached the end of its useful life. It was never very good, and it's been declining for years with vast chunks of storage taken up by unviewable files, erratic battery life, and a tendency to just kinda fukkin' die without warning mid-use. I kept it around though, because it could still play audiobooks which are my main source of entertainment while I'm working (I drive tractor-trailers).

Well, no more. My tablet is now so old and crappy that the Audible app no longer works on it. I haven't been able to download or listen to any audiobooks in over a month and I'm missing my stories (I was about to start Return of the King!). The only other device I have is my phone, which is about as old as the tablet (but less crap) and is needed for work - I need the battery life and I need to keep it untethered from the truck's stereo.

Basically, I'm tired of being stuck with the radio when it's far too easy for me to drive out of signal range of any stations I know. I need something that can download and play Audible audiobooks. I don't need or want a data plan; I have wifi at home for downloading things. It doesn't have to be very powerful and I'm certainly not looking to drop a grand or so on the latest iPad or whatever. I'm hoping you fine folks have some suggestions.

[wierd]

Functionally, a tablet is an oversized cellphone with the cellular bits cut out.

I would look for a very inexpensive prepaid cellphone with decent specs at walmart, then promptly destroy the SIM card that comes with it, and ignore its pleas for cellular access.  Depending on the handset, you can often get away with sub 100$.

But that's me.

If you want an actual tablet--  Walmart has been selling some very inexpensive, and surprisingly unbloated android tablets in the 100-ish dollar range for about a year now.

They recieved a lot of attention from the XDA kids, so there is a ton of root methods for them.

They have crippled internal storage, but that is less of a concern, since you have root, AND an SDCard slot. (this means you can use things like Apps2sd pro, and mount an EXT4 partition on the sdcard, and have it contain installed apps. You only need the 32gb for system apps.)

Or, if you are feeling more plucky-- Magisk + Fbind

If using that latter, then the "Internal storage" will be physically stored on the SDCard, and can be however big of a card you shove in.

[gimlet]

The biggest bargain for me was the Kindle Fire 10", wait for a sale and it's usually like $100.  Not great power, not a ton of ram, but fine for videos and web browsing and works really well with amazon's ecosystem. Maybe a bit too much as you're tied to their appstore, but if you really want something you can usually sideload it, even sideload google play services and appstore.  You can add an SD card (in my old version anyway, doublecheck the new generation) for more storage if you need.  Pretty good screen for the price, 1920x1200.

And yeah I keep old smartphones around to use on wifi for web surfing and looking up things to save my cell battery.   You can even buy a used one on something like swappa with less anxiety since you don't care if it is locked, you aren't going to activate it on a cell carrier anyway.   Ideally get one that can be rooted easily, that will give you the most flexibility in the future.

3rd alternative - buy a battery bank or 2 and keep one charging while you carry another to recharge your phone if it gets low. Decent ones are easily had for $15-20.
'

[Starver]

Though it's probably part and parcel of the budgetesque set of tablets, I'd suggest checking (with possible intent to avoid) if any candidate is an Android Go flavour.

I've had Apps that happily worked on old Android versions (5, 6?) and the newest ones (10, I think) but would not make themselves usable on intermediate (8, in the latest case) Go-subversion. Not through heavy multimedia use that the 'lite' hardware level couldn't handle, but apparently "developer not even bothered to provide support for side-versions, just clicked the main-run of versions in the installation-checker" or somesuch.


A few years back, I'd have suggested some non-tablet player, perhaps something that works more directly with your vehicle's inbuilt cassette slot. (Wow... in searching for a link, it looks like the technology the web has very nearly forgotten! That was the best link I could find, and still the image alone explains the actual concept if you can grasp it at all!). Though that, and indeed any other MP3-player, can also output to aux audio input like I suspect you're using (you may not even have a tape-slot, these days, and I never did patent my prior idea of a similar device that acted as a 'proxy CD' ).

Audible App, though. I presume that DRMs things rather than letting you freely put .mp3/.mpa files onto a more ipod-like device that doesn't need to power big screens and wide-spec processing well beyond mpeg audio renditioning. I've never used Audible (though I've had tape/CD/data-based audio books, transfers onto those from broadcast radio to listen to time-shifted/at later leisure, legitimately free podcast/similar downloads, possibly some 'fair use' copies of things stretched slightly over the strictest licencing interpretation but with no intent to push them onwards and into downright piracy) so I'm just assuming the obvious Protected Streaming-style of encapsulation requires you to use Audible's app (hence why you're frozen out, support having been dropped from your velnerable and otherwise trustworthy tablet).

Thus when you walk into the shop and say "I'd like the Foomaster 10 Go wifi-only tablet please!" perhaps see if there's a Demo model you can get your hands on, go to the Play Store and see if you can find the Audible app before you even dream of passing the cash over. Or go via the web browser and see if it clearly announces "Not available for your version of Android". Easier than heading back later to get a refund once you've broken the seal on the real thing...

(Non-Android equivalent issues would similarly apply, of course. And nothing will stop a publisher from dropping support once you think you're safe, though it might only leave you with interface Zeerust if it only stops you from taking up cosmetic updates and doesn't again freeze you out of the functionality.)



I have to be honest, this reply is probably more useful to me as a PTW (I might be looking for a new side-use non-mobile tablet, to augment my current disperate menagerie of devices), but having had some parallel issues of my own, in the past, it's also possibly an opportunity to usefully vent about past experiences.

[BigD145]

Ebay is a source for plenty of midrange cellphones, that are maybe 2 years old, for about $40. These are phones that used to be in the $200-400 range. Just don't use them as cellphones. It's pretty hard to find any sub 6 inch screen devices without cellular bits in it.

For tablets ETA Prime (youtube) tends to look at some cheap devices from time to time. It looks like the Lenovo Tab P11 is a bit over $200. Lenovo makes fine hardware. Chuwi is a sometimes cheaper option.

If you like to tinker then a Raspberry Pi 4 with touchscreen and battery hat would run you more than $100. OmniROM puts Android on a Pi.

[Vector]

OK, maybe this is crazy, but could you just get an MP3 player?

[Starver]

I was assuming (and said, but I honestly don't think I wrote it intelligibly enough, in hindsight) that Audible files are somewhat locked to the Audible App through DRM-trickery.

Obviously if you can get access to 'ripped' soundfiles, in open format, that'd be best. Ultimate portability[1] on MP3 players, anything that'd run VLC/ffplay/pretty much any OS-native Media Player/etc. But there lies dragons if you're still aiming at Audible stuff, so I wouldn't advise actually circumventing in that way. Even that which you've technically bought (and looking to merely regain access to) and ought to have morover-sampled.



[1] My usual vehicle even has a USB socket that will play (unexoticly-formatted) MP3s-onna-thumbdrive straight through the stereo, without even using the Aux mini-phono connector. Though I sometimes need to convert over-sampled audiofiles (some podcasts that I pick up in too high a quality) down to within whatever the slightly less versatile in-car player can handle.

[Sirus]

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. I'm going to have to shop around and figure out which method will work best for me, but I'll probably try and nab one of those Kindle tablets. A rooted phone might be cheaper but I'd be afraid of breaking something and flushing the money spent on the phone down the drain.

OK, maybe this is crazy, but could you just get an MP3 player?

I looked into this and it's not terribly feasible for me; while MP3 players can be used, it's only certain very specific models that can download and play files from Audible. Also it can only be done using a Windows 10 computer, which I do not have.

[Vector]

What: Windows 10 only? That's very silly, indeed.

[Starver]

Probably a Secure Media Path (or whatever they call it these days) thing. Tied-to-DRM device drivers/utilities that only authorise copying to a known valid Also-Tied-to-DRM place over a known Secure-for-DRM interlink (might just involve layers of encryption encapsulation according to some P/P-key schema).

Which is one step away from "security through obscurity", actually, and just ripe to be cracked wide open by someone who now is attracted to the increased challenge involved.

But still awkward. In the above circumstance. My own Windowses of choice are tried-and-trusted but also behind-the-curve I don't even bother with the seemingly default MTP file transfer options that don't work well at all. (It used to be that I could just have my old tablets act as USB Storage, but they probably got fed up with the security/support implications of being able to shuffle anything around anyway in such an unprotected mode.)