PocketBook announces A 7 tablet, another Fire-like device
Cheap, relatively underpowered 7-inch tablets. Doesn’t the world have enough of them by now? Apparently not, if PocketBook has anything to say about it. The A 7 tablet is a new (hopefully) budget tablet that doesn’t impress in any way until perhaps when the price is announced. The 7-inch display has a resolution of 1024 x 600 and only displays 262k colors (normal these days is 16 million), but at least it’s capacitive. With a 1GHz single core CPU and 512MB RAM it doesn’t impress as far as power goes, and with only 2GB of user available memory you’re really going to need that microSD slot. Luckily it only has to drive Android 2.3 Gingerbread. You do get a 2 megapixel front camera to play with, though no back camera. It’s listed as weighing in at 410 grams, and in a failed attempt at fancy marketing the dimensions are listed as “(…) 207 х 131 х 14 mm – less than a standard A5 sheet of paper”. I don’t know about you, but if a piece of paper is 14mm thick, it’s usually a wooden plank.
All kidding aside, this tablet isn’t all that bad as long as the price is right. You get Android Market access after all, so there are advantages to this over some of the other budget tablets. I also like those physical buttons, I’m tired of missing the invisible touch buttons on my S 2, and don’t even get me started on Android 3.0+’s on-screen buttons. The price really should have been part of the announcement though, as no one is going to give a rat’s ass about this thing unless it’s in the $99-$149 range or launch in more expensive markets with a price around the $200 mark. More likely though is that this is one of those devices that get placed in some obscure distribution channel and sells to people who get all their electronics from stores that sell brands no one has ever heard of.
[PocketBook via Liliputing]
