Deals: Here are the best Android and Apple tablet deals for this weekend

Amazon has set a date for the next Prime Day — it starts on July 16 — but in the meantime, the retailer is running 4th of July deals. Best Buy has its own shopping holiday called Member Deals Day, which offers extra savings for members of My Best Buy Plus or Total. The most interesting deals we found from both retailers were all about tablets, so let’s take a look.

Samsung has officially confirmed the date of the big Galaxy Unpacked event on July 10, which will introduce the next generation of the Galaxy Tab S flagship tablet. We haven’t heard much about them, but it seems there won’t be any major design changes. Also, the Tab S10+ was spotted on Geekbench with the Dimensity 9300+ chipset.

The Tab S9 generation is on a great sale with discounts on Amazon – the Galaxy Tab S9+ and S9 are up to $200 off. This generation is set to get a total of 4 OS updates (ending with Android 17) and 5 years of security patches.

There wasn’t a great deal on the Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra at Amazon, so we turned to Best Buy. Well, Best Buy does match Amazon’s prices on the Tab S9+ and Tab S9, but only if you have a Plus or Total membership.

Anyway, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra costs $1,050 for the base 12/256GB Wi-Fi model. Plus and Total members can get an additional $100 off, bringing the price down to $950.

All three slates have microSD slots, so you shouldn’t feel pressured to get the higher-capacity model unless you need faster storage. However, note that the vanilla Tab S9 has 8GB of RAM on the base variant (128GB) and 12GB on the higher-capacity options.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE and Tab S9 FE+ are mid-range options. They use IPS LCD panels (90Hz) instead of OLED, and the Exynos 1380 chipset instead of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. They have the same IP68 water resistance rating, so you don’t have to worry about accidental water damage. Although they support DeX, it’s only available on the tablet’s own display (the USB 2.0 port can’t do video out).

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (2024) is an even more affordable version. It’s the third version of this model and has a 10.4” LCD, as well as a limited version of DeX like the FE slates (but it doesn’t have water resistance, if that’s a consideration).

For the Apple slate, we head back to Best Buy. The 2022 iPad Pro 12.9 and 11, which have the Apple M2 chip, are available for $200 and $100 off, respectively. My Best Buy members can knock an additional $50 off the price. Both slates support Stage Manager, Apple’s way of tablet multitasking, which includes external displays in addition to video out.

My Best Buy members who want a keyboard with their iPad can use the link below. It takes you to an “Offer Builder” page that helps you pair the tablet with a matching Logitech keyboard and get 25% off the keyboard.

Finally, if you want to buy a tablet for gaming, you might consider something like the Asus ROG Ally X instead. This version uses the same Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU as the original Ally, but has more RAM (24GB) and is faster (LPDDR5X-7500 instead of LPDDR5-6400), so performance will increase. It also has a 1TB SSD, a (physically) larger M.2 2280 drive that will be easy to replace later if you need more storage.