High-street chain Argos is jumping on the budget tablet bandwagon by launching its own low-cost device in a bid to undercut rivals Tesco, Amazon and Google.
The 7-inch MyTablet costs just £99.99 – the same price as the Kindle Fire, £20 cheaper than Tesco’s Hudl and Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD, and £100 cheaper than Google’s latest Nexus 7.
It runs on Google’s Android Jelly Bean operating system and comes preloaded with apps, including Facebook and Twitter, plus Skype and various games. Argos is pitching the device at teenagers and the MyTablet will come with parental controls already enabled.
Managaing director of Argos John Walden said ‘Millions of people have bought tablets during the last year but there is still around 75 per cent of the UK population without one.’
‘We know that tablets will feature heavily on Christmas lists this year,’
‘At just £99.99 the Argos MyTablet is highly competitive with a
great specification.’
It is powered by a 1.6GHz dual-core processor and offers 8GB of memory – half the basic storage of other 7-inch tablets on the market – but does have a MicroSD port that supports an extra 32GB.
Argos rates the battery life at around five hours which is about standard. MyTablet comes with a 1024 x 600 resolution LCD screen – giving a pixel density of 169. Although this pixel density is lower than Google’s 323 PPI and Tesco’s 237 PPI, it is six points higher than Apple’s iPad mini.
Elsewhere, the device has a built-in 2MP rear-facing camera plus a low-resolution 0.3MP front-facing camera, and has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
After Apple dominated the tablet market for years, Google was the first major company to challenge the iPad and, in particular, the later iPad mini with the launch of its Nexus 7 by Asus. It was a budget tablet that went on sale for £159, compared to the iPad mini’s £269, without compromising on the majority of features.The search giant launched a Nexus 7 successor earlier this year that cost £199 and came with the world’s highest resolution screen.
Tesco then took it a step further with the launch of its Hudl tablet last month. The 7-inch Hudl costs just £119 and beats the majority of other budget tablets in terms of screen pixel density. It could even be bought for as little as £60 when purchased with Clubcard vouchers. At the launch, Tesco insisted it had not cut corners to produce the budget tablet and claimed it would beat similarly priced competitors ‘hands down’.
Now that Argos has joined the tablet world, only time will tell who will win the fierce competition.
Available in pink or silver, the Argos MyTablet is available from 16 October from the Argos website, through the Argos app or their high-street stores.
