Aigo Releases $160 Android Ice Cream Sandwich Tablet

By Tech Wire Asia | 8 February, 2012

Ainol has just come out with its US$ 99 Novo7 Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablet (US$ 89 with the lower-end Paladin model), but will Aigo’s own offering trump the Novo7 in its own game?

There seems to be no shortage of cheap Ice Cream Sandwich tablets these days. Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb tablets launched at US$ 500 levels or higher in 2010, while $100 machines used to be cheap, slow, shabbily-built things with resistive touchscreens. These days, though, Chinese manufacturers have gone all-out and released good-quality tablets running Google’s latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. They even beat the major manufacturers to the punch.

This particular Android tablet comes in two flavors, aimed at the same market as the Ainol Novo 7. While the price is a bit higher, there’s a premium. The Aigo M80 starts at 999 yuan, or US$ 160, and specs are as follows:

1.2 GHz Cortex A9 CPU
1GB of DDR3 RAM
8 GB solid-state drive
8-inch capacitive multi-touchscreen (1280 x 768 pixel resolution)
Full HD playback
0.3-megapixel front-facing camera (no rear-facing camera)
4,700 mAh battery
3G and Wi-Fi

At this price, it’s more expensive than the similar-spec’d Ainol Novo7, which retails anywhere from US$ 99 to US$ 139, depending on where you buy. But the premium is in the design. The Aigo M80 is reportedly only 0.268 inch thin, which is even thinner than the Apple iPad 2, which is 0.34 inch at the thickest.

Then there’s the slightly bigger screen, which might be better for many users who prefer easier viewing than raw portability.

Again, there seems to be no shortage of cheap ICS-powered Android tablets these days, so we can perhaps expect more. Maybe 2012 will be the year when Android will catch up with Apple’s iPad in terms of raw numbers, what with Amazon reportedly selling record-breaking Kindle Fire tablets, and now Chinese firms releasing inexpensive, but good-quality Android devices.

Via MIC Gadget