Ever heard of HCL? No! Neither had we up until today when news dropped at our desk that the Indian IT Service company had swaggered in to the Android Tablet market with not 1 but 3 Android tablets!
The 3 tablets cover 3 different price ranges with the cheapest of the 3 costing roughly $336 and the most expensive getting close to Xoom pricing at $738.
Unlike the Xoom and other modern Android tablets the HCL ME range are all based on Android 2.2 OS instead of the newer Honeycomb OS. This seems to be a growing trend one which will continue as long as Google keeps a tight grasp to the Honeycomb source code and SDK.
The cheapest HCL tablet called the ME AE&-A1 gets some pretty smart features despite of it’s cheap price tag. A 7 inch resistive touch screen is the biggest cost saver and has made room in the slim budget for Wi-Fi, GPS, an 800 Mhz CPU, 2Gb of on board storage and an SD card reader.
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Next in line is the Me AM&-A1 which costs $550. The extra $200 gets you a capacitive touch screen rather than a resistive unit. Double the RAM at 512mb, 8Gb of on board storage, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS and a front facing 1.3 megapixel web camera.
The top of the range HML Me Tablet known as the AP10-A1 gets a much bigger 10 inch capacitive screen, a dual-core 1Ghz CPU, 1Gb RAM, 16Gb of memory plus Wi-Fi, 3G and GPS.
The HCL tablets will go up against other domestic brands from Olive Pad and Infibeam as well as from larger companies Notion Ink and Samsung.
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