[ale] Ultra cheap tablet discussion. Are they useful or can they be made useful?

[Beddingfield, Allen]

For a couple of years now, I have been seeing these really cheap ($40 to $50) Android tablets in Wal-Mart, dollar stores, and places that normally don't even sell electronics.  Most of them are some brand no one has heard of, or a shameless re-licensing of old school brands like RCA or Polaroid.  I know they are going to be the cheapest of Chinese made junk, but how bad are they?  Would they be usable at all for basic web browsing?  I notice that most of them are running Android 5.0 or 6 .0.  Have any of you played with any of these, or investigated upgrading the OS on them?
Allen B.

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Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
Office of Information Technology
The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu