It’s official. Chinese electronics maker Hisense has introduced its first Android tablets for the US market. They’re available exclusively from Walmart, and they’re some of the cheapest tablets around.
They’re also surprisingly good devices for the price. Walmart will officially offer a $99 model and a $149 model starting May 24th.
The move isn’t exactly a surprise. A Hisense tablet showed up at the FCC a month ago, and a handful of folks have been able to buy them early from some Walmart locations for the past week or so.
As expected, the star of the show is the Hisense Sero 7 Pro. It’s a 7 inch tablet with a $149 price tag and specs that beat the $199 Google Nexus 7 in almost every way.
The tablet’s features include:
- 7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display
- 1.3 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor
- Android 4.2 Jelly Bean
- 1GB of RAM
- 8GB of storage
- 5.0MP rear camera with auto-focus and flash
- 2MP front-facing camera
- mini HDMI, microSD card slot, micro USB port
- WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC
- 10 hour battery life
The Hisense Sero 7 LT isn’t quite as impressive… until you consider the fact that it sells for just $99. Up until recently that’s about the price you’d pay for an eReader (Amazon and B&N have driven down the starting price for those devices in the last year or so).
The Sero 7 LT features:
- 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display
- 1.6 GHz dual-core CPU (probably a Rockchip RK3066)
- Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
- 1GB of RAM
- 4GB of storage
- Mini HDMI, micro USB, microSD
- WiFi
Both tablets are Google certified devices which come with access to the Google Play Store. They also come with VUDU, Walmart, NOOK, Pandora, and Facebook apps preloaded.
Up until now the tablets have only been available if you managed to find a Walmart location that was selling them early. But starting May 24th, they should be available in most stores, and online at Walmart.com.
I purchased the Hisense Sero 7 Pro today at a local Wally World Super Center for $149 as mentioned. It seems to be of decent quality build, etc. Battery already had 3/4 charge left from factory and charged fully in approx. 1 hour. Set up quickly and ran it thru it’s paces for about 2 hours. Runs fine. Screen is ok, but my Acer 10 inch has a superior display-I tried Google browser and Dolphin browser and neither compared to the Acer. That being said it is a nice 7 inch tablet for the money. I think the Nexus 7 is better quality, but you get a few more goodies for less $. I give it 4 stars out of 5 after only one day so take that into account. Both my Acer and Samsung run ICS vs Jelly Bean 4.2 on the Hisense. The Samsung 7 tab 2 works well and is only lacking when it comes to battery useage-too short! So try out some various models and brands if you can. The Hisense Sero 7 Pro makes sense if you are on a budget.
I can easily see these making life tough for any other cheap Chinese tablet trying to compete in the States.
Wow! Makes me wish I had a good excuse to get one.
Hmm, the earlier article says the Pro version has a/b/d/n/ WiFi but today’s article and the press release do not mention that. Dual band WiFi would be a really good thing to have. And it would give it another feature the N7 doesn’t have, along with the MicroSD slot.
do they have gps as well?
Yes, they have GPS. Bought one yesterday and I would highly recommend it.
Any word on whether or not these tablets will be available at Walmart in Canada? They look like a great alternative to the N7 (I recently broke mine).