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Highly recommend the Samsung S5e Tablet with LineageOS. It’s an amazing tablet for comics and light reading. Hard to beat its high res AMOLED display, incredibly light weight, and decent enough specs (I haven’t personally seen slowdowns when using Lineage on a minimal install). Forgoing gapps gets you crazy standby time.

Couple things to note is it doesn’t have a headphone jack (it is legitimately that thin though) and you are required to use Windows to flash the device.

7 comments

The S5e is super old and many devices are likely facing battery age issues.

I wish I had known this device was going to see long-term support like it received. I would have bought one at the time.

The only modern tablet officially supported is the Pixel Tablet (tangopro). It's good enough but the screen quality isn't as nice as I would like. It should be supported for many years to come due to it's SoC being common to the Pixel 6-9 phones.

I really want to move to an android tablet but love the writing on an ipad pro. Does a pixel tablet support writing/drawing with a pen and palm detection? And more importantly is there any good software support (e.g. apps like goodnotes) for that? A pixel tablet with graphene os overall sounds awesome.

tangorpro has GrapheneOS support which would likely be a better choice until security updates stop coming from Google (and GrapheneOS) 2028-06-01.

GrapheneOS installs easily via your desktop web browser with the Pixel device connected via USB.

+1 for GrapheneOS. I've dabbled in a lot of alternative roms over the years. There wasnt a single one that was as easy to install and use.

As slow as it is on paper (in practice it’s really not bad) and the batteries are indeed going, its AMOLED screen really takes the cake.

> required to use Windows

There’s an alternative flasher for Samsung’s bootloader that works on Linux/macOS: https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall

It might not work with this particular tablet, though.

There also is an updated version with fixes that never got merged into upstream Heimdall: https://git.sr.ht/~grimler/Heimdall

Yeah, I never got Heimdall to work properly.

Still using a very old Tab S 10.5 from 2014 running a bit slow with LOS 21 - Android 14.

Started with Android 4 KitKat, stuck with Linux kernel 3.4 :)

5.4mm thickness, 3GB RAM (enough for 32-bit), 2TB SD card works, watching movies/shows with the AMOLED look as good as a recent OLED TV. Truly ahead of their time.

SDR content with mDNIe dynamic enabled comes surprisingly close to HDR content on an HDR display, colors can be a bit too staturated though.

After a decade, the battery lasts a week for daily hour e-book with black background. 3 hours of video playback. However, it restarts at 30% battery when running at full brightness with a white background. Disabling Wi-Fi significantly extends standby time compared to modern hardware.

Caveats: Slow web browsing and no H.265 hardware decoder. 1440p H.264 60Mbit is the max (Display is 1600p). Most content providers and streaming services are slowly moving away from AVC, so it's stuck at 720p H.265 on CPU.

Back in 2014, I couldn't have imagined using hardware that was over a decade old.

Oh I have the same one. I had no idea it was supported by LOS now. When I last looked out wasn't. Thanks, I'll have a look for it.

If only these Samsung Android tablets had a more reasonable screen aspect ratio..

Good to know, as I still use an S5e as my comic reader. It's not getting security updates anymore, but to be honest it's not like I'm running banking software on it, so I don't care as much about malware risks as, say, my phone. It's still plenty speedy on stock firmware.

What would be the attack vectors for malware on a tablet? I’m genuinely curious how crucial updates are for older devices.

For example, there could be a web-based attack that would target unpatched webviews. This could be a maliciously prepared webpage or image on the web, favicon etc, and this piece of data could be distributed by an ad network, for example. So, browsing the internet with an out of date browser or webview could pose this risk.

Another issue is escalation. Again, we are in a speculative realm, but if a device is affected like how I described it above, it could then be the foot in the door for other attacks, like scanning the local network, and finding other devices to target, some of which might be also out of date, or be more trusting to a local device, than to an internet device. Like a router, for example, or a NAS with a passwordless LAN file share activated.

Another usage of an exploited device is it joining into a botnet, that then is rented out for any purpose the buyer would want, distribution of files, acting as a proxy for others, participating in a DDOS attack.

Thing is, most of this is automated actually. The devices on the internet are constantly scanned by automated means for vulnerabilities.

Basically the same as a computer. If you avoid installing random untrusted apps, you are generally safe (i.e. don't install random no-name Candy Crush clones from the Play Store every week like some people in my family like to do).

Every once in a while there's a more serious vulnerability that can be exploited remotely like Stagefright, but those are fairly rare and if you're here, you will probably hear about them.

anything internet facing has a ton. you're using it to browse a site that gets ad and you've got a vector -- wouldn't be the first time legitimate sites like NBC (nbc.com) served 3rd party adds with malicious iframes embedded in 'em.

mom takes her out of date tablet to check the news and bam she's rooted.

Thank you for the tip ! Was looking for a portable device at home for random browsing, it will be a nice beginning of the year project ! Do you recommend installing v21 or a previous version on this device ?

I run a minimal install of 21 right now (no gapps) and it’s great. Even handles browsing fine with Brave (built in ad blocking).

Hi @doublepg23 ! I just received my device and I've been reading the whole day off yesterday. That device is incredible and I've been very impressed. I chose the 128gb/6GB and it runs flawlessly for the moment. I'm considering moving to LineageOS, mainly to get rid of gapps, but i'm afraid I won't be able to install my apps then (CDisplayEx, Get Pocket, Plex). Can you confirm me this ?

Is there any way to export apk from apps i legitimate bought?

Sorry i'm not used to the Android environnement.

Wow, these things are crazy cheap on eBay. Thanks for the tip.