Walmart Onn Pro Tablets Are Back To Challenge Amazon Fire Again

Amazon has long been challenging and testing the limits of the retail industry but things got really personal when the e-commerce giant dared to step into the brick and mortar store business. Walmart, which some consider to be the king of that territory, has been trying to fend off Amazon's intrusions and its latest attempt is to fire another round of cheap tablets to try and beat Amazon at its own game, albeit with little success.

It's really no secret what Walmart has in its crosshairs when it launched the first generation of Onn Android tablets last year. Dirt-cheap and low-powered, the slates were intended to be loyal customer's gateway to Walmart's services. This latest batch slaps a "Pro" label on both tablets, bumping the specs up just a wee bit.

The 8-inch Walmart Onn Pro gets a 2.0 GHz octa-core MediaTek processor that's paired with 2 GB of RAM. The HD resolution and portrait orientation make it a better fit for reading and browsing than for watching videos. The latter use case is perhaps better addressed by 10.1-inch Onn Pro with the same processor, a little bit more RAM at 3GB, and a Full HD screen.

Online availability of the tablets is still unknown though some report spotting them in physical stores already. The new tablets unsurprisingly cost more than their predecessors, $99 and $129 for the 8-inch and 10.1-inch models, respectively. These also unsurprisingly come preloaded with Walmart apps but some will argue to can't hold a candle against Amazon's anyway.

The edge that Walmart's Onn has over Amazon's Fire tablets is that it comes with certified versions of Android 10. That means that, unlike Amazon's counterpart, users will have access to the entire catalog of apps on Google Play, making these pretty much typical but extremely cheap Android tablets, just with Walmart bloatware installed.