Hasta La Gadget!

Make sure your parents don’t mistake this for an iPad at Christmas

You know how the only non-iPod MP3 players that people buy are those $10 pieces of junk in dime stores, or by the checkout in cheap supermarkets? I have a feeling that the tablet market is going the same way.

With all the major players struggling to match the iPad’s aggressively low price, it may be left to junk like the $100 Arnova 7, a seven-inch tablet packed with all the latest tech — if we were living in 2005.

The tablet runs Android 2.2 Froyo, has a whopping 4GB storage, a mystery-meat processor, and an 800×480 pixel screen. The screen is — laughably — resistive, just like the ones we used to enjoy on our tablet PCs back in the day. Data can be gotten onto the machine via USB or microSD card, and you can sit back and relax as you watch movies at up to 720p (not bad, if it works without skipping).

And that’s it. What did you expect for $100? You want to know the battery life? Well, it seems that Arnova is too embarrassed about this to tell us. The product specs give both music and video playback time as “up to hours.”

It would be easy to laugh this off as a toy that nobody will ever buy, but the truth is infinitely sadder. Imagine poor little Johnny waking up excited on Christmas morning, tearing the wrapping paper off what he thinks is an iPad, and finding that his clueless parents have bought him this piece of tat instead.

Arnova 7 [Arnovatech via CrunchGear]

See Also:

• New Archos Tablet Is a Kid's Toy, Not Suitable for Adults …
• Kobo Comes to Next3 Android Craplet, Will Probably Sell a Ton …