I have a Dashboard created to control and monitor various functions around my house. But instead of pulling out my cellphone every time I want to control a function, I want to place a couple small tablets around the house. I know this subject will result in many opinions, but maybe there are tablets to avoid or ones that actually work well for this kind of application.
I use an old Nexus 7, it does an adequate job.
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I have some older Lenovo tablets, I think around 10 inch, and they are too slow for normal usage but working fine for this purpose. To some extent. Depending on the content of your dashboard, the power charging of the batteries may not be able to keep up the total power consumption, in my case this happens if I add too many live video views or keep the display light on a high level. The same happens to a very new Huawei MediaPad. If this is also the case with my new iPad Pro, I do not know, I never considered using iPads for this purpose even if that would be a good technical choice, they are simply too expensive (the one I have is around 1600€, unbelievable in comparison to the Huawei that is around 300)
Another thing to think about is the screen, the Lenovo's I have doesn't show any screen burn or ghosting even though my "home page" is partly static. This could of course be a problem on other tablets
I wasn't satisfied with the browser resolution on any tablet. Chrome for instance refuses to take full advantage of the available resolution and consistently uses a lower one. Which results in a two or three column UI. So I bough a used 22inch all in one pc with a touchscreen running Windows 10. Am going to mount it in my kitchen in the coming weeks.
I have an older Linx Windows 10 tablet. I tend to use it as a hi-res photoframe since it was actually cheaper than any actual photoframe of similar (or even worse) resolution.
Much depends, however, on what size you want and how much you want to display. Old mobile phones would work great for example with fairly simple dashboards. Older devices might struggle though with a Dashboard as Angular is such a monster (especially as Dashboard loads jQuery as well). No surprises that I recommend uibuilder in such cases 
Sometimes though, I think that we tend to over-cook home automation UI's. I'm more intrigued by really small, simple, cheap units such as the M5Stack or some home-grown equivalent with an ESP32 or a Pi Zero W underneath.
Coupled with some simple buttons (or a small touch display if you are feeling richer), you can make some really nice, to-the-point displays/controls.
