Yup only $179 cheaper even cheaper than the Kindle Fire. Crazy price, hit the jump to see when you can take advantage of this tablet bargin.
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On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Dru Ashe
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One great advantage of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) being open-source is that it looks like the whole run of the tablet market—from low-end to high-class—will soon be running Google’s mobile OS.
From the budget end of the market we get Leader International, which will be bringing 7-inch and 10-inch tablets to the CES trade show next week. The Leader Impression 7A will cost a mere $179—less than the Amazon Kindle Fire, notably—and the Impression 10A will run $299, which is less expensive than the already-cheap Acer Iconia Tab A200, which runs $329.
So what do you get for your not-very-much-money? The 7A has a 1024-by-600 screen and a 1Ghz, single-core Cortex-A8 processor, Wi-Fi, 4GB of memory with a memory card slot, VGA front camera, mic, and Bluetooth. That’s not too shabby for such a low price point, providing the tablet is decently built.
The 10A’s specs are closer to the first round of high-priced Honeycomb tablets which hit the market last year. It has a 1024-by-768 IPS LCD screen, which should be of decent quality, along with the Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core chipset that’s become standard on so many tablets. Otherwise there’s Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 4GB of storage along with a memory card slot, an HDMI output, and 2-megapixel cameras on the front and back of the tablet.
Leader points out that it has free, U.S.-based tech support, but that comes at a small price of convenience; the tech support is only available during U.S. business hours.
Both tablets will appear in stores by the end of the first quarter.
I’m bracing myself for a flood of ICS-based tablets at CES, but I’ve convinced myself it’s a good thing. Android hasn’t been able to get much traction in the tablet world, in part because of fragmentation—with some tablets based on Gingerbread (and with cell-phone screen resolutions, no less) and some on Honeycomb, the platform sends a mixed message to developers who are trying to build tablet-compatible apps. Releases like Leader’s hold out hope that we may see a little more uniformity in screen resolutions and software versions this year, which could only be good for Android tablet software options.
