The £50 Android Tablet Experience

July 16th, 2012, 19:49 Posted By: wraggster

While Apple is content to keep the price of its iPad range reasonably high, the open nature of Google's Android operating system has resulted in a deluge of low-cost slates from the technological sweat shops of the Far East. It would be easy to dismiss such devices as cheap and nasty, but with many selling for less than your average pay-as-you-go mobile phone, this is surely a sector of the market which demands further investigation. Three weeks ago, pricing reached a new all-time low: a capacitive screen tablet, running Android 4.0, was available for just £50 - and we just had to find out what kind of experience you got for the money.Shopping in this area is a minefield, largely due to the anonymous nature of the products themselves; it's not uncommon to find the exact same tablet branded with several different monikers and retailed by multiple distributors - just like the Scroll Extreme slate we reviewed back in April. However, in general, most of the 7-inch variants tend to share a common bond in the fact that they utilise the ARM-based "AllWinner" chipset, a low-cost alternative to the more expensive offerings from the likes of NVIDIA and Qualcomm. Our test model was no different.Our tablet is known as the NATPC M009S RTB - although it comes in generic box with generic instructions, and features no branding whatsoever - and it's available from Amazon supplier Wendy Lou, who supplied us with a review unit. Other variants - each with slightly different specifications - exist at higher RRPs, and it may pay to shop around. The review unit that actually turned up is closer to the £70 model. This is identical to what was then the £50 offering, with the additional bonus of a 25 per cent larger battery, more RAM and HDMI output. However, the CPU runs with lower clocks.Clearly the market value of these tablets is influenced by the ebb and flow of production, with specs seemingly changing with the tides. The price of the base model has risen since we received our review unit, but keep a look out on the bargain forums and they'll be sure to drop again.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df...oid-experience

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