First Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Tablet
NOVO7 Android (7-inch tablet)
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS is the latest version of Android OS that Google has prepared for the masses. The first device that Google has confirmed will (and has in some areas) launch with Android 4.0 is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone. In the tablet field Google hasn’t confirmed Android 4.0 for any particular tablets.
Best of my knowledge at this time tablet makers Acer, Asus and Lenovo have only confirmed they will be upgrading some of their tablets to Android 4.0 when they have the OS ready –individual tablet makers do their own personal tweaks to the OS that improves performance in some cases but mainly they add pre-installed apps and do some UI element changes (colors, font etc.).
Not one single new tablet has been unveiled with Android 4.0 by any of the major manufacturers active in the tablet market at this time.
Earlier today small electronics maker MIPS Technologies unveiled the first Android 4.0 tablet with the $99USD Ainol NOVO7. The new NOVO7 features a Ingenic JZ4770 mobile applications processor that is composed of a 1GHz MIPS-based XBurst CPU and a Vivante GC860 GPU clocked at 444MHz. According to MIPS Technologies the NOVO7′s Ingenic processing chip is capable of handling 1080p video decoding and all the Android apps you can throw at the tablet.
Other features set aside for the $99 NOVO7 tablet include a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen, a rear 2MP camera with VGA front-facing webcam, USB 2.0 port, HDMI 1.3 port, exFAT storage support (transfer files larger than 4GB to this tablet without issues), a microSD slot for memory expansion (no exact account for how much is built-in to the $99 model), 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi only with the ability to use external 3G, and the tablets battery provides 6 hours of gaming/ 25 hours of music/ 8 hours of video/ 7 hours of Internet/ 30 hours of stand-by battery life.
Currently this ultra-cheap Android 4.0 tablet is available for purchase in China only but over the next several months MIPS says you should expect to see their tablet offered by companies like Leader International under a different name in locations like the United States–Leader International sells their Android tablets under the Impression brand. If you can’t wait for other non-Chinese brands to release the NOVO7 tablet you can purchase the tablet direct from the Ainovo website, which MIPS runs, and have the tablet shipped to your home for $60USD not counting the cost of the tablet itself of course, which is $99.00 (no taxes).
Besides launching the 7-inch NOVO7 tablet today MIPS Technologies also promised that 8- and 9-inch models that mirror the NOVO7 would be coming soon.
This isn’t the first Android 4.0 tablet expected, right?
When your thinking of the first tablet to be available for purchase with the latest edition of Android OS you would at least expect the tablet to pack a dual-core ARM processor, but alas the low-cost NOVO7 only has a single-core Ingenic processing chip. I guess all of you performance fans will need to wait for Asus to update their new Eee Pad Transformer Prime quad-core tablet to Android 4.0.