• Tweet

The Wikipad is an Android tablet built for gaming — and it has the detachable game controller grips to prove it. Last year the company promised to sell a 10 inch gaming tablet for $499.. and then ran into a series of problems delivering on that promise.

Now Wikipad is back at it, and this time they’re offering a smaller, cheaper model which could be pretty exciting if it actually launches on schedule this spring.

The new Wikipad has a 7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel touchscreen display, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor. It has WiFi and Bluetooth as well.

In other words, if you took a Nexus 7 tablet and surrounded it with a game controller, you’d pretty much get the Wikipad. But the Wikipad has a microSD card slot, which the Nexus 7 lacks.

The Wikipad 7 will ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean software and Wikipad is partnering with GameStop, NVIDIA, Sony, and other companies to bring the device to market.

Wikipad will sell the new tablet for $249.

There are a few good reasons the Wikipad 7 will cost half as much as the original 10 inch version. First, it has pretty much the same internal components, but it will come to market a year later, after component prices have fallen. Second, it will have to go up against cheap tablets like the Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire, making a $499 tablet a tough sell.

While the Tegra 3 processor at the core of the gaming tablet may be a bit dated by the time the Wikipad hits the streets, it will be in good company. The first Ouya gaming console which is expected to start shipping in March is also powered by a Tegra 3 chip.

So there’s still plenty of incentive for developers to optimize their games for the Tegra 3 platform, even if Tegra 4 is just around the corner.

via The Verge