Prices for Windows tablets have been falling quickly… but things are just starting to get silly. US retailer Micro Center is now selling a Windows tablet for just $60.

Sure, that’s a sale price, but even at full price the WinBook TW70CA-17 only sells for $90.

That makes this 7 inch Windows 8.1 tablet cheaper than an HP Stream 7 or Toshiba Encore Mini, both of which sell for around $100.

winbook tw70

Don’t expect bleeding-edge hardware from a tablet at this price. But the WinBook TW70 certainly doesn’t have the worst specs I’ve seen for a cheap Windows tablet.

It has a 7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel IPS LCD display, an Intel Atom Z3735G quad-core Bay Trail processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage.

The tablet has a microSD card slot for removable storage, a 5-point capacitive touchscreen, 2MP front and rear cameras, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, a micro HDMI port, micro USB port, a full-sized USB 2.0 port, and a 3.5mm audio jack. It also supports GPS.

The WinBook TW70 measures 7.4″ x 4.8″ x 0.4″ and weighs about 12.3 ounces.

Micro Center also sells an 8 inch model called the WinBook TW800 for $100, and a slightly more powerful WinBook TW801 with more RAM and storage for $140.

The only catch? Micro Center doesn’t ship purchases. While you can order products including these tablets, you’ll have to pick them up in-store… which can be a problem if you don’t live near a Micro Center location.

thanks sir_tech!

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24 replies on “Micro Center is selling a $60 Windows tablet”

  1. I purchased one of these due to the price being so low, I figured the price was worth the experiment. The lack of RAM isn’t the problem, you can’t actually do squat with 16gb of storage. Even with the OS compressed this little guy only had 4.77gb of MMC free on startup. Install the “free” subscription of Office 365 and perform the first round of updates and it was down to a whopping 500mb of free MMC. Reset it to factory, took it back and got an ASUS ME170C instead for the same money.

    Don’t get me wrong, I WANTED to like it. The hardware would be great for Android or possibly even a light Linux distro but most certainly NOT Windows 8.1.

    As of yesterday Microcenter released a run-once utility that would appear to move Office to SD but without the tablet in-hand I could not test it. This still does not address the lack of available space for OS updates, I don’t think that Microsoft or the tablet makers planned for this scenario on a 16gb hardware.

    1. No tech wizard here but I use a Nokia 521 for music streaming and backup phone, and that thing has only 8gb, and I believe 1gb ram, with windows 8.1 latest update, and if it wasn’t for my audio books I would have 3gb of free space. It handles everything I throw at it with minimal lag. I see a lot of appeal with windows for my parents since they are intuitive and easy to control and figure out for baby boomers. I use galaxy s4 and nexus tablet for myself when not at desk but I know it would be a nightmare for mom. Gonna give this a try. 2mp rear can is what seems lame, even on the 8″ ones.

  3. Does this come with the 1-year office 365 key like all the other cheap windows tablets? If so, might be worth the hour drive to Micro Center, since you can sell the key on ebay for $35-40, you end up with a $25 dollar Windows tablet.

  4. They left out the best available one – there’s a WinBook 10-inch tablet for $199. Admittedly, only 32 GB of RAM, but expandable via SD slot. Not only does it have a full-size USB 3.0 port but also front and rear cams, which is something the low-end Asus and Acer two-in-ones don’t have at more than $100 extra. Add in the WinBook keyboard cover and you’ve got an equivalent for much less. Only drawback is the MS Office is a one-year subscription to Office 365, not the free versions Asus and Acer offer.

    1. 32GB of storage, 32GB of RAM probably costs more than $199 on it’s own. I personally can’t see the appeal of a rear camera on a tablet. Not a bad price though.

    1. Agreed, but this is at least priced appropriately. At $60 it would make a good device for just casually browsing the web. At least it has 1280×800 IPS display, which most under $200 don’t!

    2. I would have agreed if this is android.
      But Windows tablets run very well on 1GB RAM. Also, qaud core bay trail helps a lot in performance.

      You can check user reviews from Amazon on HP stream 7 which has similar specs.

    3. That’s why idiots like you exist. To let the smart ones benefit. 🙂

    4. I’m passing too. 1 GB of RAM for what I’d like to do on a UMPC is not enough.

      However, I think $60 for this is appropriate. It should let consumers have realistic expectations of what you can do with this device.

    5. You realize the iPad 3, 4, and Air all have only 1GB of RAM, correct? The only iPad with more RAM is the Air2 at 2GB.
      For $60, this is an ubelievably versatile device (particularly for techs). ‘Not sure what it is *you* do with a tablet where you have higher expectations and have greater demands, particularly at this price point.
      To make a ridiculous generalization like this with no support just comes off as a knee-jerk assessment.

  6. I sniff some good old-fashioned market-playing tactics behind these prices. Intel sells its SOCs at negative prices, Microsoft gives OEM $0 Windows licenses, just like in the netbook era when Linux netbooks proved too popular to Wintel’s taste.

    The only difference is that now they want to kill Android tablets (and te iPad).

      1. Only problem being, they’re not committed to this price point, and will abandon it with alacrity once the dirty deed is done.

      2. That would be really a happy event indeed.

        Right after the demise of competitors, that happy $60 price would be replaced with a $160, not-so-happy price tag (monopolies work just like that).

        1. People keep saying that… but if anyone has any example of any other product, that went down for marketshare, and then flagrantly came up again after getting a bigger slice, other than petroleum fuels, what other functional monopoly can you think of, that might have pulled off that move ?

          1. The example you are looking for is netbooks. Maybe you didn’t live through that exercise of pump and dump.

          2. Netbooks are in the timeline of this price drop, not a separate example. They told themselves a 7″ Asus Eee PC, for $400, was as low as they’d ever go, and after they kill off the Linux netbooks, they can bring it back up. Now… it’s not only 7 years later, but Chromebooks have become a thing, and ooh look… there’s a 59.99 PC on the shelves :))

          3. Disagree. Netbooks were dead for years when Chromebooks came out. Only reason there’s cheap usable Windows machines now is because of Android and Chromebooks.

        2. I don’t think that will matter. Even if the price for a tablet or notebook with an Intel processor (SoC) was to jump up in price, Intel and/Microsoft would basically be abandoning that market. For the lower end market ARM and others, maybe even MIPS would take over that market, and Intel and Microsoft would be in the mid and higher market, if they were to increase their prices.

          Personally, I don’t think either one will be in a position to do that, besides the current SoCs will just be sold at lower prices for the next generation of low price point devices.

    2. The only way they are going to beat Android is if Microsoft can convince consumers that Windows is a better choice. Android can also run on Intel chips so they can’t beat them on price alone and there are Android tablets in this price range too.

    3. Windows was never free during the netbook Era, it was only discounted to about $30 for XP and under $50 for W7SE… All of which was only about $20 less than the normal OEM pricing at the time and didn’t include the Professional and higher versions that remained original price… While the netbooks had really low margins but they weren’t subsidized…

      There is also no longer a Wintel alliance… Intel support of Android and GNU/Linux, along with supporting projects like Tizen puts them at odds now and is one of the reasons MS has to convince the OEMs to use their software…

      So you shouldn’t make too many direct comparisons as the situation is definitely different now…

      Besides, the Intel subsidizing ends sometime next year and they’ll have to start competing on actual cost/value after that point… but the subsidizing bought them the time they needed to develop their own fully integrated SoC with the SoFIA SoCs they partnered with Rockchip to help develop and the time needed to get the 14nm FAB updates rolling out…

      Along with setting up new networks and databases that will provide a infrastructure they couldn’t provide before… providing OEMs not only with a larger database of reference designs but also a database of 3rd party parts that will be certified to just work with the Intel components and that’ll lower OEM costs and provide a much better incentive for them to continue making Intel based products…

      Though, whether they can keep the costs as low as they have with subsidizing remains to be seen but we’ll find out by the second half of next year when all these changes occur…

    4. Yea, it’s obvious that big M is just doing this to garner market share back from the chrome portables. These things are definitely selling at almost cost price.

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