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The Arnova 8 is guaranteed to disappoint anyone who wants an iPad this Christmas
And so it begins. Possibly the only way for tablet makers to compete with Apple (until they actually make a viable alternative to the iPad) is to sell gullible consumers a tablet so cheap that they’ll buy it on impulse. Hey — it worked for MP3 players, right?
So, what will poor Johnny be getting for Christmas this year, instead of the iPad he asked Santa for? He’ll be getting the £99 ($159) Arnova 8-inch Android tablet from UK catalog-shopping store Asda.
This piece of landfill-ready consumer crap comes with just 4GB storage (plus a microSD card slot), runs Android 2.1 Éclair (remember that? Éclair first launched in 2009, with the 2010 version following in early 2010) on a mystery-meat 666MHz processor.
It gets worse. The screen features yet more tech from yesteryear — it’s resistive, not capacitive, so good luck with the multi-touch. Battery life is a poor 5.5 hours for video (likely to be much less in practice) and… and… And that’s it.
The sad thing is that Asda will probably sell out of these things, as uninformed people like Johnny’s parents snap them up. Even the PR pitch sent to me today shows that this is all about duping the high-street shopper: “just a quarter of the price of the more expensive versions on the High Street” it says [emphasis added].
Calling the iPad a “more expensive version” of this is like calling the Wacom Cintiq a “more expensive version” of the Etch-a-Sketch. A horribly designed, technologically out-of-date Etch-a-Sketch at that. An Etch-a-Sketch so ugly that even the product page for this real-life shipping product features no pictures other than a single CG mockup.
Should you actually want to spend your hard-earned cash on something that will likely disappoint anyone who uses it, and is cast almost immediately into the junk drawer, the Arnova 8 (from Archos, no less) is available now.
Arnova 8 Tablet [ASDA. Thanks, Tracey!]
See Also:

How Bad Could It Be? The $100 Arnova 7 Tablet
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Via: Gadget Lab