Coby releases low cost Ice Cream Sandwich tablets to the Masses

While the Android tablet market is prominently dominated by big name manufacturers like Samsung, Motorola and ASUS, one can’t forget some of the other guys out there. Coby is one of those companies that doesn’t always come to mind when you think of a great tablet at an affordable price. They should be though. We had a chance to check out some of the pre-production models of their latest tablet offerings to the Android community. We were extremely surprised and impressed with the tablets we saw, especially since they were all pre-loaded with Ice Cream Sandwich right out of the box. Which we know many big name manufacturers are still struggling to achieve. The latest line of tablets offer a lot more than just ICS though.

One are that Coby seems to had really focused on is size options. The new line offers 9 various screen sizes with various resolutions from 7-inch at 800 x 480 to 10-inch at 1280 x 800.

• Coby MID7042 – 7 inch, 800 x 480 pixel display
• Coby MID8042 – 8 inch, 800 x 600 pixel display
• Coby MID9042 – 9 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display
• Coby MID9742 – 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display
• Coby MID1042 – 10 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display
• Coby MID10245 – 10 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display

All of them offer the same 1GHz single-core Cortex 8 CPU and 1 GB of RAM. The each support a Micro SD slot, HDMI port, USB port, and a front facing camera. The 7 inch and the 8 inch variety offer you 4GB internal storage while the 9 inch through the 10 inch all feature 8GB of internal memory.

The only downside is the lack of Google Apps. The tablets all come pre-loaded with GetJar as the app market of choice, at least for now. That doesn’t make the tablets any less functional though. We did have a few minutes to talk with a gentleman at CES about the tablets and did a short, and less than amazing video, of the larger 10-inch 1280 x 800 model variant.

As you can see it is thin, light and beautiful. At least in our opinion. They don’t look cheap like you find with many of the Chinese manufactured imports that barely turn on and hardly function. While the they aren’t Transformer Primes, one can hardly argue that for the price they shouldn’t be. Staring off at a $179 for the smallest 7-inch model and peeking out at only $279 for the largest 10-inch model makes them a great tablet to pick up. Currently the MID9742 and the MID7042 are available for purchase while the remaining variants will be available shortly.

While I can’t find them for sale just yet anywhere on the web, the site does list them as available for sale. With the current state of the country’s economy being as terrible as it is, a Coby tablet might be enough to get you by for a while. What do you guys think? Are they worth taking a closer look at?

Source: AndroidCommunity