The Lenovo A1 is not a heavyweight Android tablet but it sure made quite a big splash in the tablet scene by coming with a $199 price tag. It may not be as cheap as the $99 HP TouchPad but the A1 doesn’t come with a quasi-extinct OS.
At $199 (Php8,300), the Lenovo A1 is far more affordable for a 7-inch Android tablet. It’s akin to the WiFi version of the original Samsung Galaxy Tab which is almost twice as expensive. It doesn’t come with the tablet-centric Android Honeycomb OS nor a SIM card slot for 3G internet, calls or messaging.
What you’ll get from the Lenovo A1 is a purely WiFi Android Gingerbread branded 7-inch tablet running on a Cortex A8 1 GHz single-core processor. It has a 3 megapixel on the back and a VGA camera in front. You’ll also get Bluetooth, WiFi, microSD slot and microUSB for better accessibility, unlike the 9-pin connector on the original Galaxy Tab.
The specs are nothing noteworthy but on the plus side it’s beautifully crafted and only 11.9mm thin with different colors to choose from. Lenovo also says it does offline GPS and navigation with a unique chipset powered by Navdroyd.
The $199 is the price for the 16GB model and there are plans to release a 32GB model when it becomes available. In effect, it’s an affordable mid-sized tablet simply for content consumption and some light gaming.