[android] Carphone Warehouse trumps Tesco and Argos with £49 tablet

[Arthur]

First Tesco, then Argos and now Carphone Warehouse.

 

Carphone Warehouse battles Tesco and Argos with £49 Avoca 7 tablet « Wired

 

British retailers are clearly of the opinion that there is no end to our appetites for budget Android tablets, with Carphone Warehouse slashing the price of its 7-inch slate to compete with Tesco and Argos.

 

At just £49, Carphone Warehouse's Avoca 7 tablet undercuts both of its rivals, costing half the price of Argos' MyTablet, and making it seem like a steal compared to Tesco's £129 Hudl.

 

It's important not to take these price tags at face value though, as we've already seen in the MyTablet, which offers very disappointing specs that suggest a far inferior performance to the Hudl. Perhaps not surprisingly for the meagre cost, the Avoca 7 does not look promising on paper.

 

At 800x480 pixels, the screen resolution is probably one of the most worrying things about this tablet. At the top end of the 7-inch Android tablet food chain is the Nexus 7 2, which offers a 1,920x1,200-pixel display and for the sake of comparison, even the MyTablet offers a 1,024x600 pixels. Maybe very young children won't be bothered by this, but anyone who is used to looking at a semi-decent phone screen will likely be put off.

 

Inside is a 1GHz processor with 512MB of RAM. In terms of storage, the Avoca 7 has only a tiny 8GB built in, but this can be expanded by up to 32GB using a microSD card. As on the MyTablet, the Avoca 7 has a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera, which isn't exactly going to paint a sharp, clear, colourful picture of your subject.

 

The Avoca 7 has "the latest Android 4.2" on board according to Carphone Warehouse, by which they presumably mean Android 4.2.2, even though it reads as though it really does offer the absolute latest version of Android.

 

This only adds to the impression that the introduction of these low-cost devices into the market is a bit of a ruse by retailers, through which they attempt to lure in less tech-savvy customers by touting poorly specced tablets as utter bargains.

 

The Avoca 7 is available now, but if you're waiting for a real bargain, maybe hang on until later this year, when Suneet Singh Tuli said he will be bringing Datawind Aakash tablet designed for students to the UK for a mere £29.

 

Carphone Warehouse trumps Tesco and Argos with £49 tablet « The Telegraph

 

“We know that over a third of tablet purchases are for children and family use but that one of the main barriers to not buying a tablet is cost," said Graham Stapleton, chief executive of Carphone Warehouse UK.

 

"Our Android 7” tablet smashes right through the previous lowest priced tablets and is perfect for families and anyone wanting a modern, portable tablet at a bargain price. I know a tablet will be top of many Christmas lists this year and this price makes top technology affordable for even more people, so we're expecting this to be hugely popular.”

[Dos_Box]

I think I'll still be looking at the Hudl as it has GPS so will be much more versatile for in-car use as well. The screen resolution and CPU would put me off that as well.

With quad-core increasingly the norm now I wouldn't give the CW one much in the way of longevity. Even as a cheap 'my-first-tablet' for the kids I suspect it will feel increasingly out of date very rapidly if the kids want to play games on it.

[Norphy]

It's hard to call that "trumping" Tesco and Argos considering that the spec is significantly worse than both of them. Good lord, how hard did they have to look to find a supply of 800x480 screens?!

[Arthur]

It's hard to call that "trumping" Tesco and Argos considering that the spec is significantly worse than both of them.

The Telegraph's words, not mine.

 

You are right though. The specs of this tablet are very poor especially considering that £49 was just a temporary price.