Polaroid may be best known for making cameras… and this year the company has a rather intriguing mirrorless camera running Android 4.1 on the way. But the company has been offering low-cost Android tablets since last year.

So far we haven’t seen particularly good tablets from Polaroid. But the company does know how to make a cheap tablet — at one point there was a Polaroid tablet with Android 4.0 selling for $100.

Now Polaroid is showing off a new line of tablets with slightly better specs and starting prices of $129.

Polaroid 7 inch tablet

The Polaroid Booth at CES is filled with tablets in a range of sizes. There’s a 7 inch model, an 8 inch model, and a 10 inch tablet.

The 7 inch is the cheapest of the bunch, starting at $129. It features a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel capacitive toucshcreen display, a 1.6 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 dual core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, a 2MP rear camera and a 0.3MP front-facing camera.

When I got a chance to test the tablet, it seemed reasonably fast… but the screen viewing angles were underwhelming.

There are a few things to like about this tablet. It has an HDMI port and SD card slot. It’s a Google Certified device with the Play Store, Google Maps, and other Google software. And it runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The back of the tablet also has a pretty attractive matte red and black finish.

But even if the Polaroid tablet has features that some other tablets lack, the budget tablet space is pretty crowded at this point, and it’s hard for a company to stand out or compete with major players like Amazon and Google/Asus.

Polaroid is also showing off an 8 inch tablet which looks nearly identical to the 7 inch model, but which has a 1024 x 768 pixel display.

Other models include a 10.1 inch tablet with a 1024 x 600 pixel display and a 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel model.

The best thing I can say about these tablets is probably that they all look better than the models Polaroid was showing at CES last year. That seems to be a trend as CES 2013: The crappy tablets are less crappy than they used to be.

We should see at least some of these tablets hit the streets in a few months.

Polaroid also claims to have models with higher-resolution, 1280 x 800 pixel displays, but either the spec sheets at the Polaroid booth were wrong, or the models the company is showing off at CES aren’t the final products, because most tablet had lower resolution screens.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

6 replies on “Polaroid launches some more mediocre Android tablets for $129 and up”

  1. I thought it was a good deal I got my s8 from kohls on blkn Friday Polaroid I thought Polaroid it should be good but it has HDMI and SD storage so didn’t think to look how much memory it has its slightly fast but lags and the apps you get stuck with 12 mob of cache you can’t clear so internal memory sucks wish I would have waited but sent my mail in rebate with receipt so I’m screwed craigslist here I come have a merry Xmas everyone…

  2. Crap.
    Not even a decent cam on these things… for a Polaroid device, really?

  3. No reason to touch Polaroid’s 7″ crap tablet if the Archos Titanium 7 inch is at $119 with an IPS display and an aluminum case, but otherwise similar specs.

    1. That’s like asking which knife you wan to be stabbed with.

  4. People greatly underestimate the low-end until it is too late. Low-end tablets have been slowly moving from “cheap” to “good enough” to “more than good enough”. When the default is “more than good enough” a phase transition is likely to occur.

    For example I have one of last years tablets for $50, and it gets very heavy use as a XBMC remote and DSLR remote controller among other things. While it would the ludicrous to use a $200-$300 unit for such purposes but at $50 it’s a no brainer. The one limitation of the low end has been the 800×480 resolution. In my experience 1024×600 is quite sufficient especially at 7″. While I regard the A10 to be quite sufficent for most purposes an RK3066 is more than good enough.

    Consider 6 months from now when units like this hit retail endcaps at $76 or the like.

    1. I think you have hit on a good trend to watch. The use of cheap tablets for things that aren’t tablet tasks. Before we had lots of cheap and/or overstock hardware and dedicated hackers repurposed some of it but it took a lot of effort. Now it all runs android and you don’t have to find the exact same part number as the other guy who hacked up something interesting to duplicate the work, just grab ANY cheap Android device and load the app.

      We are seeing a disconnection between hardware and software on small gadgets like we have had on the PC for decades. The world will change in ways we won’t fully understand for a couple more years.

Comments are closed.