Android tablet or a cheap laptop for school: the answer is your exam portal

Every "tablet vs laptop for students" debate ends the same way: the tablet is more fun, the laptop survives, and the real judge is whichever piece of software your exams require. Before comparing anything, open the department's requirement page and the exam portal's system notes - if proctoring needs a desktop browser or lockdown software, the tablet is a lovely notebook and nothing more.

Where the tablet quietly wins

• Handwritten notes and marked-up PDFs. A stylus on lecture slides beats typing on a small laptop keyboard for most people, and the tablet is doing it in a lecture where a laptop would be rude. Ten-inch class with a keyboard cover closes some of the laptop's gap.
• All-day battery and instant-on. Tablets idle like phones, wake like phones, and a good mid-range tablet genuinely survives a full campus day - most budget laptops with tired batteries do not, and your campus socket is a lottery.
• The phone life it buys you. Cellular tablets and a big phone on the same plan mean the notes travel without public Wi-Fi. A laptop in the same lecture hall is a theft conversation you did not want to have.

Where the laptop is not optional

Long-form writing with a real keyboard at a real pace - theses, case notes, anything that ends in a proper document rather than an app's export. Files that are files: moving a folder of scanned sources, running reference managers, unzipping a dataset. And the one budget-laptop advantage over every tablet: it can grow - a free RAM slot, a bigger SSD, a second life as the house machine. The tablet you bought at "student price" is the exact size it will remain forever.

Three checks before you buy either

• The exam portal test. Find one past paper or practice quiz the first-year class group chat never stopped complaining about, and confirm it runs on the device you are considering. That complaint list is the real review site.
• Storage truth. 64 GB on a tablet is a fiction after the university app, the messaging flood and one semester of PDFs - check the card slot or the cloud policy your school gives you before the device, not after.
• The keyboard test. If the tablet is in play, type a real paragraph on the on-screen keyboard for five minutes. Most people who hate typing on glass only know they do after a deadline.

The verdict, as a rule

Tablet with a keyboard is the right machine for: reading-heavy courses, handwriting, fieldwork, one subject where a stylus changes how you think. Laptop is the right machine for: everything that ends in a serious document, proctored exams, and students who need one device to do the whole job. And for the budget that buys one good machine rather than two mediocre ones - the laptop wins for most people; the tablet wins for the few who know exactly which job it will do.