14 DAY TRIAL // India seems to have a thing for cheap tablets. We've seen the very cheap Aakash (and its successors) and the 10.1-Inch Jelly Bean $200 model from Videocom. Now we have a new slate to gaze upon.
The IT player now making a move on the tablet front is none other than Simmtronics Semiconductors, a company that develops, manufactures, sells and supports memory, motherboards, tablets, low-cost PCs and related parts.
The newest item to leave its labs is called XPAS X-1010 and it is an Android-loaded tablet with a screen diagonal of 10.1 inches.
There is nothing too awe-inspiring about the hardware, but this was the whole point of the design. Simmtronics is more concerned with affordability.
Indeed, the XPAS X-1010 has a tag of Rs. 8,449, which corresponds to $156 and 117 Euro, according to exchange rates.
The payment will net buyers a 10.1-inch LED with a native resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels and capacitive multi-touch support.
The processor is a quad-core Allwinner A10 ARM Cortex A8 with a speed of 1.2 GHz. Dual Mali 400 GPUs provide the graphics prowess.
Speaking of which, the supported video formats are AVI, RM, RMVB, MKV, WMV, MOV, MP4 (H.264, MPEG, DIVX, XVID), MPEG, MPG and FLV (up to 1080p).
Moving on, Simmtronics gave its tablet WiFi 802.11 b/g/n wireless support, USB 2.0, a microUSB port, 3G (via USB dongle), a 3.5mm audio jack, a 0.3 megapixel camera (on the front), 1 GB of RAM (random access memory) and 8 GB of NAND Flash storage space (expandable via 32 GB memory micro SD card slot).
MP3, OGG, WMA, FLAC, M4A, MP2 and AAC audio files, be they music tracks or recordings, can be played.
Finally, the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system is installed on the 10.1-inch slate. Indian e-commerce websites and retail stores should start accepting orders soon, if they haven't already received stocks.