Every now and again, a tech deal can really change your life in a very immediate and critical way. That happened to me just this weekend ,when I purchased the Lenovo M9 tablet atBest Buy for $79and gave it to my six year old daughter.
For months, I had been pushing aside a growing problem. My daughter loves watching videos on YouTube Kids, but she can’t run the YouTube or YouTube Kids apps on herAmazonFire for Kids tablet.
So my daughter would frequently come to me and ask to borrow my phone so she could run those apps. Being a doting dad and a sucker, I let her borrow my phone and she even learned how to unlock it herself and launch the apps.
However, lending your phone to a kid is not without its issues. And here’s where the problems started.
Lenovo M9 Tablet:was $139, now $79 at Best BuyThis 9-inch Android tablet is powered by an 8-core Mediatek Helio G80 CPU, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. Its display is a sharp 1340 x 800 resolution and it comes with Google Kids Space software.
I missed a lot of alerts on text messaging apps, including Slack, which I use for work. My daughter would bring me the phone if I was getting a call, but she would just swipe away notifications if they appeared while she was using my handset.
I ended up late to get some messages and this became more and more of a problem. But I didn’t want so spend a lot of money just so my daughter could watch YouTube Kids. Then I saw a sale.
The Lenovo M9 tablet is now just $79 at Best Buy. This 9-inch tablet is has a 1340 x 800 resolution screen, a MediaTek Helio G80 processor with 8 cores, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. It charges over USB-C and seems to have a long battery life.
The M9 is not an Android tablet that runs standardGoogleapps such as YouTube and YouTube kids. Unlike many Android tablets, it has Google Kids Space that provides a custom child-friendly UI with parental controls baked in.
I bought the tablet via Best Buy’s in-store pickup so I could get it in time for the weekend.
So my daughter got a tablet that is kid-safe, she gets to watch her favorite videos and I got my phone back so I can get alerts from work right away. It’s a win-win for $79. The tablet seems light, bright and fast enough for what she’s doing with it.
Whether you’re shopping for a kid or an adult, this $79 Lenovo M9 deal is hard to beat.
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Avram Piltch is Managing Editor: Special Projects. When he’s not playing with the latest gadgets at work or putting on VR helmets at trade shows, you’ll find him rooting his phone, taking apart his PC, or coding plugins. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram developed many real-world benchmarks, including our laptop battery test.
