By 
Coby, makers of several budget-priced Android tablets over the past few years (their MID7015 pictured above), has announced their latest product lineup. For release during the first quarter of 2012, five new Coby tablets of various sizes will debut with Ice Cream Sandwich on board. The company hopes to be one of the first to market with an Android 4.0 slate, and will be showing off their new goods at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Coby will cover the gamut of tablet sizes with 7-inch, 8-inch, 9-inch, 9.7-inch, and 10-inch models. All will utilize a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU and capacitive touchscreen and will feature up to 1GB of RAM. Other particulars include WiFi support, expandable storage up to 32GB, and HDMI 1080p output.
No prices were announced, but Coby suggests it will continue to offer its new lineup at wallet-friednly prices. We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for the new set of slates during our yearly visit to the Vegas strip and the CES exhibitor hall.
[via PRNewswire]
no market = no deal
Or wait for root and/or use adb to push and install it
These do have the Android OS intended for tablets (4.0), so I imagine Google might be a little more willing to allow them to access the market.
They are big in eReader market in Canada, as a Toronto based company. They can gain additional market using that popularity, but they have to be very wallet friendly to sell these. Like below $200 friendly.
Coby seems to indicate 2 things:
1. Fragmentation will never really be stopped.
2. Google’s purchase of Motorola couldn’t have been better timing.
Explanation:
Fragmentation: Coby’s low price proves that hardware manufacturers will not be able to compete unless they put their spin on the OS. Why buy an expensive tablet running ICS if the inexpensive hardware is running the exact same thing?
Google’s acquisition of Motorola: Since the hardware game is going to come to a finite couple of heavy hitters, Google was smart to jump on board and be one of them. This way they can offer trendy hardware (Kevlar backing) and still offer up-to-the-minute updates of their software. (This aside from sueing the pants of Apple in the apple instigated patent wars). If you think about it, Apple would never go to all the trouble with designing their phone so expensively (which is a mighty nice piece of equipment) if a cheap version could run the same OS (though iSheep are willing to pay a royalty to travel with the apple logo).
I look forward to awesome new Moto-Google products. That is all.
1) The expensive hardware will run faster with more apps at a longer battery life with a better screen and a stylus and . . . and . . . Android is getting better and better in its vanilla implementation. As a result, manufacturer customization of the OS is becoming less and less important.
If android version updates slow with 4.0, then fragmentation will finally begin to decrease. There will be one OS across almost all devices.
2) Evidence the hardware makers will be reduced to a few? I don’t see why there couldn’t be a dozen or more makers selling at different feature levels.
Ill buy one :)
I want a really cheap ICS tablet. lol
If the tablets look nothing like the MID7015 then yeah I would consider one.
Market is easy to install.
Where did they say that Google Market was not included? I would assume, that like Honeycomb, the Market comes WITH the OS.
Anyone can fork android and sell phones or tablets with it. Google, however, will only allow the android market, the youtube app, google maps, etc. on the devices they approve. There have already been several tablets that did not have the google extras. I think one of the Archos tablets suffered this problem.
Sweet. Maybe I can finally get a taste of that ice cream sandwich. FU VZW!
I dont see anything wrong with a cheaper tablet. I wished it was dual core though. That seems to be the minimum for quick operation, though my DroidX seems to have enough cpu power to do the job for playing netflix, email etc.
I have a Coby Kyros MID 8024 ( A8 1ghz / 512mb RAM ) running a different ROM from stock ( Gingerbread 2.3 ) and I have to say I am completely satisfied with my tablet… It’s fast… looks good…. battery life is poor but it happens in all tablets and smartphones…. I paid $190 … a great price for these specs… specially considering that a Galaxy 7″ has the same specs and costs waaaaaaaaaay more.
All the Google crap you can add one way or another….
Kyros rules!!!!!!!!
P.S. Just waiting for the ICS ROM…. :>