Sylvania launches a 10 inch tablet for some reason

J&R is now taking orders for one of the cheapest 10 inch tablets I’ve seen to date. It’s a Sylvania Magni Tablet for $199.99. Unfortunately, it looks like you get what you pay for. The tablet has a ridiculously low resolution display, an outdated ARM 11 processor, and just 256MB of RAM and 2GB of storage.

The tablet has an 800 x 480 pixel display. In other words, the screen is 10 inches, but it can display just as much information as the 3.7 inch screen on my smartphone. The tablet also has a 1 GHz AMR 11 processor, 802.11b/g WiFi, 2 mini USB slots, a 1.3MP camera, headphone jack, and HDMI output. It runs Google Android 2.2 and has a 1400mAh battery.

While it’s nice to see more budget Android tablets hit the market, it’d be even nicer to see more budget tablets with specs that make sense.

via My Tablet Life

Posted on Monday, April 4th, 2011, 5:30 pm by Brad Linder | 9 Comments

Anonymous

Actually you can get much better for less. A Badpad with a 1024×600 display and the excellent Telechips 8903 chipset will set you back $180.

In a few years time I suspect we will be curious why people were pushing >$300 tablets so hard.
http://twitter.com/loadran Ran

Thank you for not calling 800×600 hi res, Brad.
Shrapnelli

Agreed. What’s really embarrassing is when Apple (of all companies) has come across as being the affordable choice amongst the competition.

The vast majority of the upcoming tablets are overpriced in my opinion!

I’d also appreciate it if Brad, with regard to him having no hesitation in pointing out that ‘you get what you pay for’ in this case, I’d appreciate it even more if he held equal ground in pointing out when you ‘don’t get what you paid for’.

Because this is the case with most ‘premium’ tablets.

And since when did a computer shipping with 1 GB of RAM become a premium again? Have we gone back in time?
Anonymous

I think Sylvania might have ripped off some of my patents! My company’s tablet hits the market next week. We’re still trying to decide whether to call it the “TurdPad”, the “Turdlet”, or the “TurdBook”. Its design is really organic…resembles a shingle with a piece of dog poo on it. Poodle poo, in fact. (We also have an e-Reader on the market called the “Tinkle”). Wink wink.
Anonymous

*smells* There it is again. It’s that POS smell. Oh well. Didn’t Sylvania enter the netbook market at the start? Wow talk about giving tablets a bad name. I guess these turds will get flushed and we will get to have the main players and that’s it. I’d be happy with that. Let the big boys play and let the imitators eat ..it and die. I do find these types of releases interesting none the less.
Anonymous

You’re confusing ARM tablets with regular computers…

ARM tablets are evolving from Smart Phones… Unlike PC Tablets they don’t need as much RAM and only recently have they pushed to 1GB.

The original iPad for example only had 256MB of RAM, and then the iPhone 4 pushed that to 512MB and the iPad 2 keeps it at 512MB. While tablets based on older ARM offerings still have 256MB or less RAM.

Both iOS and Android are very basic operating systems originally designed for Smart Phones and just adopted for tablet use because they are optimized for touch interface and require very little hardware to run well. But you can only do a fraction of what you can with a more developed OS like Windows or OSX, which in turn requires more powerful systems to run on properly.

While Honeycomb is the first version of Android actually made for Tablets, just to show where the level of development is actually at right now.

So don’t confuse ARM tablets with what is normal for x86 systems.

What you can compare is that tablets are also still priced similar to the rest of the market with hefty profit margins. The iPad only cost Apple around half to a third of what they charge for it. Other products like the iPhone have even heftier profit margins. But this is the norm for the market.

People may just be confused because netbooks are the exception and are priced nearer actual cost. So while ARM is moving into that product range they are not being priced the same.

So while you can find cheaper ARM tablets they are spec’ed lower than any netbook and can do far less. Even the new iPad 2 only has better graphics than a netbook.

Only the next gen ARM solutions coming out later finally rival the Intel ATOM for CPU performance and make the prospect of running a advance OS like the upcoming Windows 8 a more practical solution. But aside from price competition don’t expect the prices to drop too significantly from what they are going for now. Though pricing should be a little better by then…
http://nards-barley.myopenid.com/ Nards-Barley

I was over at the Amazon.com at noticed a comment that listed the specs. Don’t know if they are correct, but sound credible. If so, it would appear this tablet is better than listed:

* Arm 11, 1GHz (the iPhone2G used an ARM 11 at 400MHz for comparison; this is the previous generation ARM but is perfectly competent, and fast enough for this tablet
* 10.1″ resistive (not capacitative) touch screen; Hint: use your fingernail rather than the pad of your fingers, and you won’t need the stylus. It’s a resistive touch screen, so needs a sharper depression to activate than capacitative touch, which just requires a wet object to disrupt the field … and forget about multi-touch
* Display 1024×600 (not 800×480); 16:9 aspect ratio
* Battery: 3800mah (not 1400mah)
* 2.1 megapixel camera (not 1.3)
* 256MB RAM
* 2GB Micro SD Card included (in slot 1) … I can’t actually tell if there are 2GB of flash memory, and at startup sound that might be a disk drive. There seem to be a few GB of internal storage somewhere.
* 2 Micro SD Card Slots (Up to 16GB)… slot 2 is read only
* 2 USB Slots (regular size)
* HDMI output
* Stylus
* Size: 6.5x11x0.5″ (not 12x10x3.5″, which is the size of the box that it came in)
* Android DG3.20 O/S (whatever that is, DG for DigitalGadgets) … I actually do not believe that this is updateable to Android 2.2 because memory is only 256MB (but I’m willing to be corrected if someone is actually successful with the update)
* Uses the SlideME app market, but you can download .apk directly on your computer, and put them on the SD card in slot 1 to expand your selection

http://www.amazon.com/Sylvania-SYTAB10MT-10-Inch-Magni-Tablet/product-reviews/B004GKM61G/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
http://nards-barley.myopenid.com/ Nards-Barley

Sure enough JR.com updated their specs for it:

http://www.jr.com/sylvania/pe/SVV_SYTAB10MT/
Mnspotbec

Just got mine at shopko on close out for 129.00 10 inch

Sylvania launches a 10 inch tablet for some reason

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