I'm interested myself in hearing answers to this, as I was just in the market for a tablet for someone. I couldn't find a thing worth buying, except for the Fire HD10. Best choice I could have made. (I know, OP would rather avoid the ads, but I'd personally rather avoid the pitfalls of so many other Android tablets: poor quality/lo-res screens, outdated OS versions, just about everything from China, wretched build quality, and probably most common: CRAP batteries that WILL die on you sooner rather than later.)
Right now -just sayin' the Fire HD10 32GB is $109 (for Prime members) and there's NOTHING even remotely comes close at that price point. Not for my money. The screen is just beautiful- everything else I looked at in the same price area paled in comparison.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01J6RPGKG/
I'm not for certain, but I think the models 'without special offers' are without the ads. The person I bought it for doesn't care about the lock screen ads. So even at $124 for the 32GB to be rid of ads- still a steal in my book. It's worth it at the normal $149 price.
(But I will say it's dirt simple to put the Play Store and alternate Launcher on the Fire tablets without rooting or messing too much with them, and with those additions, IMO it bests virtually everything else. There's not even an Amazon account on the one I got for someone.)
Pop a nice big SD card in that and it's at least as good a tablet as other name brand models that cost 3x as much. Importantly, the battery isn't known to be a POS that won't keep a charge 4 months from now like a lot of the "wow! What a deal!" cheap-o Chinese tablets. (Just read user reviews of just about anyone that's had one for any length of time.) Possibly there are exceptions, I'd sure like to know which exact ones.
Will be interesting to see if anyone has a suggestion better than a Fire HD10 for $109 but honestly at this point, I'm of the mind I could threaten to EAT it if it exists and not have too many worries about having to do so.
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