Cheap Tablet as 'Media Centre'

mono78v

Member
Aug 28, 2013
2
0
Hi Everyone,
I'm new to this forum and tablets and after some advice and recommendations.
Basically what i want to do is use an android based tablet as a kind of media centre for my music mainly. At the moment I use an Ipod in a docking station connected to my amp to play my MP3's and listen to my music but recently my wife has been plugging in her Ipad and I've been using my HTC smart phone too as we've realised this gives us access to lots more. Ie; internet radio, spotify, stuff like that. The prob is this is getting annoying to keep swapping devices to play different things. My plan is to get an android tablet which I can put all my MP3's on (around 1500 at mo but want capacity to do 3000) and can download internet radio ap's, spotify ap, maybe youtube ap, bloom.fm ap, etc to have a selection of music sources. I've had a quick look but so many to choose from its stressing me out not knowing what i need. I obviously need a wifi connection on it so i can stream stuff and download ap's and a 3.5mm headphone socket for Audio out to my amp but apart from that i'm pretty clueless.
I have a budget of around £100 but be nice if I could get something for £60 or £70 maybe? Ooow, It must have some way of standing and looking nice on a table top (wife has a great case for Ipad which does this, something like that would be great so it can sit at a nice angle and look smart). its not going to move just stay there with power lead in so batt life not important.
Another future idea I also wondered if poss, if there is some way of also getting video out I could sign up to netflix or something and get there ap then have my sound through amp into good spekers and pic onto my TV maybe?? is there any thing which will allow video output??
Any advice or recommendation on what to buy would be great.
Many thanks.
Chris.
 

mono78v

Member
Aug 28, 2013
2
0
ooow, forgot to say. think something smaller would be preferable but doesn't have to be, maybe 7"?
 
D

dvdcatalyst

Guest
Hi,

Welcome to the forums.

You can pick up just about any of the cheap tablets, but on some you will have to check and see if you can get Google Play installed on them. For music, local (mp3) or streaming, the specs of the tablet don't matter much.

But for your purpose, I would look into picking up a used smartphone instead. I'm sure you can pick up a 2 year old top-end phone for cheap, either from eBay or from a pawn shop, and with some digging find a docking station for it.

When I upgraded from my Droid X to a Galaxy Nexus, I kept the DX, and have been using that for music around the house. Just turn on airplane mode and enable wifi, and you are golden. Look for a phone with a memoryslot if you need a lot of space, or just use Google Music, and stream from there.

edit:

missed the TV-out part.

There are phones with TV-out. My DroidX has it, but it has been a long time since I last used netflix on it though.


regardless, for that price, I'd go with a cool looking previous-generation phone, rather than a cheap tablet.
 
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