In my search for tablets, I have from time to time come across some pretty cheap tablets: Those which are cheaper than Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, and B&N Nook. I decided to look through the performance and features of these tablets, and I was actually astounded by that. Most of them are capable of performing much better than your popular tablets out there—from Google, Asus, Samsung, HP, etc.
These tablets are quite offsite in fact, available only in select markets in the Asian countries and some European countries. Here’s a list of those high performance tablets that you may have never heard of.
1. Gotview Smart 10 IPS
This is a Russian powerhouse of a tablet. It is manufactured by the company, Gotview which you probably have never heard of. It is no simple tablet though. It has a 9.7 inch display and Rockchip 3066 dual-core processor clocked at 1.6 GHz, which is based on ARM Cortex-A9. Rockchip is a brand of processors mainly used on embedded systems (those systems with their own brain like digital watches, traffic lights, ADSL routers), and we will be seeing this processor quite a lot among these tablets. It has 1 GB of RAM and MALI-400 graphics processor.
This tablet retails for 8890 Rubles which in USD should be around $294.
2. PIPO M1
This one looks like an iPad, but it runs Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean. It also runs RK3066 Rockchip processor at 1.6 GHz. It has 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. The capacitive multi-touch display is 9.7 inches.
The tablet can be purchased for 206 dollars, and as accessories you can purchase leather case (13 dollars), power bank battery pack (27 dollars), touch pen (2.49 dollars), screen protector (2.99 dollars), and HDMI cable (6.5 dollars).
3. Hyundai Hold X
Yes, you read it right. The car company Hyundai of South Korea is the manufacturer of this particular tablet. This beautifully designed tablet has a 7 inch LCD IPS capacitive multi-touch screen. It also runs Rockchip RK3066 dual-core 1.6 GHz SoC, and 1 GB RAM. The internal memory is only 8 GB. The operating system is Android Jelly Bean 4.1.
The tablet is priced at mere 136 dollars excluding the accessories.
4. Yarvik Xenta Tab9-200
This tablet also is powered by RK3066 chip and has 1 GB of RAM. The internal storage is 16 GB. The size of the display is 9.7 inches. The ppi ratio of the display is only 132ppi, which is sort of disappointing.
The tablet is approximately priced around 295 dollars.
5. POV ProTab 3
This Nexus 10 lookalike comes with the same hardware configuration as the others above. It runs Android Jelly Bean 4.1, and weighs around 595 g. The name of the company that manufactures the ProTab is POV, which is Point of View. The internal storage option given on the tablet is 8 GB.
The exact price was not known, although it is around 295 dollars.
Conclusion
There are quite a number of unknown manufacturers of smartphones and tablets out there. Most of them run Android operating system. Since Android is a quality open OS that can be downloaded and modified by anybody, these OEMs find it extremely useful. They are also creating very good-performing tablets, although they may never come to the mainstream. Most of these tablets are available in cheap Chinese markets.