Well, the competition is getting more fierce, as within two to three months of time, the stupendous efforts from OEMs have resulted in the announcement of three low cost affordable tablets from the most trusted brands in the tablet space.
The three major devices announced were:
- Kindle Fire by Amazon
- IdeaPad A1 by Lenovo
- Nook Tablet by Barnes and Noble
Both IdeaPad A1 and Kindle Fire cost $199, while Nook tablet costs $249. From the hardware spec point of view, all the three devices carry almost the same configurations with slight feature additions on some of the devices.
Operating System
Both IdeaPad and Nook run Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), but Kindle Fire runs on a customized Android version by Amazon.
Screen Dimension
All of the three devices sport 7-inch capacitive touch display, with 1024*600 resolution.
Nook and Kindle Fire use In Place Switching technology to support wide viewing angle.
Processor
All of the three devices equipped are with Texas Instruments OMAP 1GHz Processor. But just the processor on IdeaPad is not duel core.
RAM
Nook tablet hosts a powerful 1 GB of RAM, while Kindle fire and IdeaPad have 512 MB of RAM.
Storage
Kindle fire - 8 GB internal, and no expandable memory.
IdeaPad and Nook - Both have 16GB internal storage, and expandable memory upto 16 GB.
Bluetooth Support
Only Lenovo IdeaPad supports Bluetooth Version 2.1 + EDR and none of the other two tablets support any version of the bluetooth. This give an upper hand to IdeaPad in the competition.
USB
USB 2.0 (micro-B connector) is available on all of these three devices.
3G
The only feature which makes these three devices take a back seat is the lack of 3G support. Basically, these devices don't have a SIM slot at all.
Though few variants of IdeaPad have 3G support, it boosts up the price as well.
Wi-Fi
Available on all the three devices. 802.11 standards.
I would like to stop at this point, as this is not a complete product review. I just wanted to touch upon the important hardware specs as mentioned above. These devices have marked the beginning of a new era in tablet space. However, this is just the beginning as the tablet business is picking up. No wonder there would be other players venturing into this business.
