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Velocity Micro to Unveil New Cheap Android Tablets at CES (Again)

The Virginia based custom PC maker Velocity Micro has just pre-announced their newest tablets. VM is getting a jump on the competition this year and they plan to have a pair of tablets running Android v4.0 ICS some time this Spring.

Along side their PC models, VM will be showing off a 7″ and a 10″ Android tablet. The new 7″ Cruz Tablet T507 is billed as a budget tablet, and VM is boasting that it will cost only $150. It’s running on a Cortex-A8 1.2GHz CPU with a Mali 400MHz GPU, 8GB Flash storage, and a camera. The T507 is also going to be getting a larger cousin. The T510 will have similar specs, just with a larger screen size and a rear facing camera. It has the same CPU and GPU, and HDMI out.

If these tablets live up to the specs then they’re going to be really cool. But I notice in the press release that VM doesn’t mention the screen resolution, and they also don’t mention the release date. And it seems likely that they won’t be shipping with Android Market or Google apps; VM’s last several tablets shipped with the Amazon Appstore and the Kindle app.

But before you get too excited about the new tablets, you need to remember that these are the folks that showed off several tablets at CES 2011 which I don’t think were ever released. And those mythical tablets had a lot in common with today’s tablets; each runs the latest cutting edge version of Android and had best in the market specs for the quoted price.

We could be looking at more vaporware. In any case, they’re on my list of companies to meet.

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Comments


Mike Cane January 4, 2012 um 10:28 am

Will ICS even run on an 800×600 screen? I don’t think so, but don’t know so.

And a 400MHz GPU? Is that a joke or what?

cookie January 4, 2012 um 3:08 pm

The Galaxy Tab runs a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU I believe. I wasn’t laughing when I learned that so I don’t know why I would laugh now.

Mike Cane January 4, 2012 um 6:44 pm

Hmmm…

SGX540 (20M Triangles/s(Built-in Samsung S5PC110-111) 1Gpx/s@200 MHz,Built-in SOC

So, I was wrong to think 400MHz was slow.

cookie January 4, 2012 um 7:43 pm

Ha. I wouldn’t know. But since I wasn’t sure what the joke might me, I googled the Galaxy Tabs GPU for comparison.

Mike Cane January 5, 2012 um 10:48 am

I give up on commenting on Cortex CPUs. The numbering A8, A9 doesn’t really tell the whole story.


monopole January 4, 2012 um 12:19 pm

Sounds like a great comics/manga viewer. a 10″ with a 800×600 4:3 (or preferably higher resolution) capable of running Perfect Viewer and ComiXology (and the usual ebook readers) with a few hours of battery life at a cheap price would be perfect for this niche.
This doesn’t require spectacular processor power, or insanely great specs. Just enough juice to do rescaling on the fly
While 7″ tablets are excellent for manga in tank format, the 10″ tablet is better, especially for American comics.


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