Our favorite Samsung tablet for kids is on sale for under $100 at Amazon

If you're shopping for your child's first tablet this holiday season, it can be tricky to sort through all of the options. You want a tablet with excellent parental controls and great durability to keep up with active children. There are a lot of tablets on the market for different uses and age groups, but there's one in particular that has caught the eye of our CBS Essentials in-house tech experts. 

The Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite is our top pick for the best Android tablet for kids age 6 and up. It offers well-rounded features with easy-to-use parental controls -- and the best part is that it's currently on sale for under $100. Keep reading to learn more about this top-rated tablet and find out how to score it on sale before Christmas.

Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 Lite: $99 (38% off)

The Galaxy Tab A7 Lite is an affordable option for anyone, not just kids. To take full advantage of parental controls, an adult will need to combine the integrated features with optional apps, like Bark for Android (which costs between $5 and $14 per month, based on the level of control an adult wants over the child's tablet).

This tablet offers an 8.7-inch touchscreen display and a battery life of up to 10 hours.  It runs the Android 11 operating system and offers full access to the Google Play Store where many optional apps are available to expand on the tablet's core capabilities.

This tablet comes with your choice of either 32GB or 64GB of internal storage, which is not much. But it's expandable to up to 1TB with an optional microSD memory card. 

If you're giving this tablet to a child, we highly recommend subscribing to the optional Samsung Kids service. Like Amazon Kids+, this is a subscription-based, safe environment for a child to explore and connect with the world. It includes unlimited access to family-friendly activities designed to entertain and educate. The subscription cost is $8 per month or $60 per year.

Why we like this tablet:

• This is an affordable, full-featured, Android-based tablet.
• The tablet offers a 8.7-inch WXGA+ touchscreen display with 1,340 x 800 pixel resolution.
• The tablet is housed in a metal frame, which makes it a bit more durable than most tablets, especially if an optional screen-protection film is added.
• The Samsung Kids service can easily be added to the tablet.

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