No need to spend big dollars if you need a tablet. For only $99 bucks you can get your hands on a functioning Android tablet. Not packed with features but it will get the job done. Check out the Matrix One after the jump.
What a difference a couple of years can make—the last time we took a look at a $99 Android tablet, we came away so scarred by the experience that we recommended you save your $99 and buy some top-shelf liquor with it instead. Another contender for the $99 Android tablet throne has emerged, however: the Matrix One, a 7-inch tablet running Ice Cream Sandwich, was on display at this week’s Consumer Electronics Week in New York City, and we took some time to go hands-on with it and talk to Raymond Pelosi, the Matrix One’s Vice President of North American Retail Distribution.
Today’s news cycle has been dominated by another 7-inch Android tablet, and the Matrix One draws some inevitable (but not always unflattering) comparisons as a result. The Matrix’s port layout is solid—one USB port for peripherals, a mini USB port for connecting to a computer, a headphone jack, a slot that will support up to 32GB MicroSD cards, and an HDMI port—one of the demo units was hooked up to a 1080p TV and looked to be playing a movie without issue. A two megapixel front-facing webcam (though no rear-facing camera) is included, though neither it nor the single rear-facing speaker are particularly impressive. The $99 version comes with 8GB of storage but only 512MB of RAM, while a $149 version ups that to 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM (the same amount as the Nexus 7). The device is just .45 inches thick, and while the construction is very plasticky there’s not much bending or flexing.
Where the Nexus 7 clearly bests the Matrix One is in screen quality and performance, and that’s where you’ll really be able to tell the difference between the $200 tablet and the $100 one: the Nexus comes with a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and an impressive 1280×800 capacitive IPS display, while the Matrix One uses a single-core 1.5GHz Cortex A8 and a 800×480 capacitive display that performs reasonably but has an unimpressive contrast ratio and poor viewing angles.
But, as Pelosi told us while holding the tablet horizontally in front of his face, “you don’t look at your tablet like this.”
Pelosi, an animated fellow, has big plans for the tablet: by pricing the Matrix One to move, he wants to undercut Amazon and the other players in the space and sell “about a million” of the tablets in their first year. He also wants to work with developers to implement a curated Android app store to put on the tablet alongside the unmoderated Google Play storefront. Whether those goals can be achieved is a bit questionable, since Pelosi said that he was still searching for retail partners to stock the tablet (and, indeed, it doesn’t even appear to have a website as of this writing), but he said that it should be available “by the end of July” if all went according to plan.
The Matrix One won’t win any speed or design awards, but when compared to other tablets in its price class it looks like quite a bargain—the fact that it appears to work as intended puts it head-and-shoulders above the Maylong M-150, at any rate.
Ars Technica
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