Tablet test - screen, touch and hardware

Check an Android tablet end to end and get an honest condition grade.

Which device are you checking?

Pick the device in front of you. The checks are tailored to it — a desktop is never marked down for having no battery.

A big screen is where the faults are

Tablets fail differently from phones. The screen is large enough that a dead zone can sit in an area you rarely touch, and pressure damage from being carried in a bag shows as discoloured patches rather than as cracks.

The touchscreen grid scales its cells to the panel, so a 12-inch tablet gets a genuinely full sweep rather than a phone-sized grid stretched across it. The grey uniformity and gradient fields are the ones to look at carefully — pressure marks show there long before they affect anything else.

Worth checking on a used tablet

Charging port wear, because tablets are charged while propped up and the port takes the strain. Speaker balance, since most tablets have several and one failing is easy to miss when it is lying flat. And the state of the battery, which on a tablet that has spent two years plugged in is often worse than the cosmetic condition suggests.

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