There are a lot of very cheap Android phones and tablets out there… but a lot of them have pretty awful hardware. If the Hisense Sero 7 Pro shows us anything though, it’s that the cost of good hardware is falling rapidly.
These days you can pick up one of the best 7 inch Android tablets available for just $149.
And if you’re willing to compromise a bit on the screen or storage, you may even be able to get a halfway decent $100 smartphone or $59 tablet.
Sunnycube V7 $59 dual-core tablet
Chinese device maker introduces a dirt cheap 7 inch Android tablet with a VIA WonderMedia WM8880 ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core processor in May. Now it’s available in the US from Geekbuying, where you can order one for just $59.
The Sunnycube V7 doesn’t have the best specs around, but with a dual-core CPU, Android 4.2 Jelly Bean software, support for 1080p HD video playback, and a capacitive touchscreen you could certainly find worse ways to spend $59.
Just don’t expect a bleeding edge device. This model has a 7 inch, 800 x 480 pixel display, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. It has VGA cameras on the front and back.
It won’t replace an iPad mini or Google Nexus 7 anytime soon, but this cheap tablet could be a good option for a kid’s first tablet or more specialized uses — someone recently asked me for advice on a tablet that could be hooked up to a speaker system and used as a clock radio with support for Pandora internet radio. The Sunnycube V7 would probably fit the bill.
via Geekbuying
DAXIAN XY100S $100 quad-core smartphone
At least as impressive as a $59 tablet with a dual-core processor is a $100 smartphone with a quad-core chip.
CNX-Software found a phone that fits the bill. It’s called the DAXIAN XY100S, and it has a 4.7 inch, 854 x 480 pixel display, a MediaTek MTK6589 ARM Cortex-A7 quad-core processor, and PowerVR SGX 544 graphics.
The phone has just 1GB of RAM and 4GB of storage, so it’s not going to challenge the latest superphones from HTC, Samsung, LG, or Sony anytime soon. But it’s a pretty impressive device for $100.
Keep in mind, that’s the phone’s full price. You don’t have to pay your wireless carrier a penny or sign any contracts to buy this phone for $100.
Other features include 802.11n WiFi, a 2MP front camera and 8MP rear camera, and an 1800mAh battery.
It’s also a dual SIM phone. But unfortunately it only supports TD-SCDMA mobile networks, which means it may not support 3G data speeds in some parts of the world, and it certainly won’t work on 4G LTE networks.
You can pick up the DAXIAN XY100S from BuyinCoins for $100.
$45 dual-SIM 7 inch smartphone
To be honest, this phone isn’t all that good when you look at the basic specs. It has a 1 GHz MediaTek MT6515 ARM Cortex-A7 processor, a 7 inch, 800 x 480 pixel display with poor viewing angles and a little too much screen flicker, only works on 2G networks (not 3G), and it doesn’t appear to have a lot of memory or storage.
But it’s kind of neat anyway, for three reasons:
- It sells for just $45 at retail in China.
- It features dual SIM card slots.
- There are three batteries, including two that you can swap out without even turning off the tablet.
Charbax from ARMDevices picked up this Android 4.1 phone/tablet in China recently, and Roland at MobileGeeks filmed a little video showing off the device’s features.
That super cheap device is intriguing due to the hot swappable, user replaceable batteries; very nice. Let’s have more of this!!! How much ram does the device have? Any chance that someone would make an updated version of android available for it?
Crap-crap-crap
not!!!! $157.68
Stay away from a device with 512K RAM. They are great for watching local or streaming video or audio, but don’t run other apps for didly:
mail, web-browsing, etc always dies with “wait/close/report”
You could buy an Abacus for even less than $1. Shut up, Abacus is also a computer!
I am salivating on this, I could put cheese on it and eat it.
Well, 45$ for 2G tablet with phone built it – not bad! Many countries, mine included, dont have nation-wide 3G coverage so folks outside big cities/far away from big cities are left with EDGE 2G speeds, so given that I paid ~260$ two years ago for 3G enabled ZTE V9, which has slower CPU, but the rest seems to be the same, except for swappable batteries+you can get 3G version of this Chinese cheapie for 20$ more, then I call it awesome deal!
I wonder if you can use one of this tablets as an Airplay receiver, stream music & video to a Tv or if you have an old iphone dock. Or find a way to connect them to a video surveillance system. Use the tablet as a monitor for seeing who’s at the door, etc. Any thoughts on this?
Use one with a web streaming camera to keep track of the kids in the back yard, one as a weather station, use one with a fredompop cellular hot spot to get Pandora radio in your car. There are a ton of uses for a cheap tablet like this!
Hey brad, does anyone in the U.S have support td-scdma networks?
Unlikely. This is a China domestic market protocol designed to avoid US intellectual property.
Dual battery, hot swap even, and dual sim on a 7″ tablet, tempted.
We could be entering an era when owning multiple tablets is common, thanks to really low-cost tablets: have one in the kitchen, on your coffee table, bedroom, have a large one for looking at photos and video, smaller ones for reading things, and so on. By the end of the decade, stores will be selling them in “family pack” bundles of three!
this is a very compelling scenario given the wide availability of sync services like Dropbox. imagine if they didn’t have bezels and you could lock them together into a single big screen for family movie time?
Due to my grand daughter breaking her tablets, we have a few. They were bought with a warranty and they don’t ask for the broken ones to be returned. We have had the broken ones repaired at minimal cost, so we keep and use them.
Wow, the cheap tablet and the cheap phone would both make nice alarm clock / internet radios. I think that person you mentioned already found a solution but might want to look into more possibilities.
Hehe… didn’t want to point any fingers… 🙂
But yeah, while I wouldn’t recommend getting this sort of thing as a primary tablet, you reminded me that there are totally uses for dirt cheap devices like these if you plan to use the table tin a way that doesn’t require great viewing angles or long battery life.