Honestly, I’m baffled by the tablet market. Everyone puts out underpowered devices. Even Google! How can you, in good faith, justify a tablet having a slower processor and less memory than a phone while trying to advertise it as the superior device, perfect for editing and whatnot?
Meanwhile all I want is a relatively cheap tablet sized display/AIO that can be powered by PoE and has no battery for displaying Home Assistant. (With ePaper it becomes totally crazy) Whoch seemingly is impossible.
Time to DIY!
Waveshare touchscreen for pi, 1200x800 is a good price and for home assistant that is fine. $70/75 for 8inch/10.1inch version. (10.1DP-CAPLCD)
Raspberry pi 3/4/5 can mount directly on the back of it. For whatever outrageous price Pis are now. (Around here, a 4B/4GB is 60€.
Wave share PoE hat for $20
Assemble it like Lego, put it in a wooden frame or 3D print, done. Around 160 USD plus shipping for a full build of a POE battery-less touchscreen display that runs full Linux of whatever flavor. (And is quite overkill as far as power).
You could probably do it even cheaper with an orange pi zero 3 with a PoE to USB-C converter or a Banana Pi BPI-P2 Pro IoT which has PoE built in.
It is cheaper than a tablet and strips out the useless things like a battery, camera, really high DPI display, LTE radios, etc… For a simple home assistant kiosk.
But yeah, epaper displays are 3x the display cost without touchscreen. Though in my opinion, epaper is better for static non-interactive sensor display which can run on battery with an MCU for almost no power because it only has to update once an hour or so.