It seems that a lot of Chinese manufacturers will be able to make great tablets on the cheap thanks to the release of the open source Android 4.0. Now everyone will be able to get Android 4.0 tablets even at a price point of around $100, and you might have a lower quality display, and lower hardware specs, but otherwise, you won’t notice much difference in functionality thanks to ICS, the latest version of Android.
Hyundai (not to be confused with the car manufacturer) is just another of such companies who promises to release their Hyundai A7 7″ tablet with Android 4.0 for only $79. It will come with a 1.5 Ghz processor, a 800×480 resolution display, 512 MB of RAM, 8 GB of internal storage, and will be able to play 1080p video, and as well have support for SD and TF cards. It will be missing GPS and Bluetooth support.
This year should be the year when Android tablets are finally taking off, and part of that reason is because of finally having not only an open source version of Android for tablets (Honeycomb wasn’t open source), but hardware that is cheap enough so manufacturers can make $100-$200 tablets that are simply “good enough” for most consumers.
Most people don’t want to pay laptop-level prices for a tablet, when most of the things they do is just browsing, checking e-mail and playing some casual games. But under $200 there’s a whole growth market just waiting for the manufacturers to notice it, and I think 2012 will be the year when not only Asian manufacturers notice it, but also the more recognized brands do, too.