Low-Cost Android Tablets Flood The Market

With a touch of irony, a serious contender for iPad’s Christmas sales could be from Next. Not the company Steve Jobs launched in his wilderness years but the equally style-conscious UK clothes chain store.

Next has moved on from only selling the Archos seven-inch tablet to stocking its own 10-inch, 1280×800 touchscreen Android tablet on sale alongside it. The tablet also has 2GB of memory and is supplied with an 8GB MicroSD card which plugs into a card reader slot on the tablet.

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On the face of it, the Next tablet follows in the steps of the iPad, with two USB ports, headphone and microphone sockets and built-in Wi-Fi; but it lacks the 3G mobile broadband option.

Also for £180, the Disgo Tablet 6000 is a humbler Android slate with a seven inch, 800×480 pixel screen. Although it has 2GB internal memory, it does not come supplied with anything in its MicroSD card slot.

The Disgo does support high density (HD) movie playback and also has a mini HDMI socket for connection to an HD TV.

In October and November there will be many other, mainly Android, tablets appearing but there has been a delay on the one expected from LG.

Apparently, the troubled South Korean company has ditched its plans to release its finished slate this year and will concentrate, instead, on battling it out with Apple in the more lucrative smartphone market. LG reckons that Android 2.2 needs further work to be optimised for tablet use.

This will give LG’s local bitter competitor, Samsung, space to grab market share with its Galaxy tablet.