Taiwan’s Micro-Star International showed two new Android-based tablets at Computex this week that appear much sleeker than the WindPad tablets it has unveiled in the past.
The WindPad Enjoy 10 and Enjoy 7, which are being shown in a small room away from the show floor, will start shipping to retailers at the end of July, priced at US$299 for the 10-inch version and $199 for the 7-inch version, said MSI product manager Rory Chen.
The tablets on show here were running the 2.3 Gingerbread version of Android. MSI hopes to start using the 3.0 Honeycomb Android OS on the tablets later this year, but it’s unlikely to be available with the first devices that go on sale.
The Enjoy 10 isn’t as thin and light as the iPad 2, and a spec sheet shows the new tablets have no 3G option — only Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It’s also behind the iPad in other areas such as memory and storage. But the Enjoy 10’s $299 price tag makes it considerably cheaper than Apple’s tablet, which starts at $499 for the Wi-Fi-only model.
MSI said it is targeting 4 to 6 hours of video playback on a full battery charge. Both tablets have a 1.2GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor, though staff at the MSI booth couldn’t immediately say which vendor is supplying the chip. They have front- and rear-facing cameras, 4GB of built-in storage and an accelerometer for motion detection. They have ports for mini USB, mini-HDMI, and a micro-SD card up to 32GB.
The Enjoy 10 weighs 795 grams and the Enjoy 7 weighs 395 g. For comparison, the iPad 2 model with Wi-Fi only weighs 601 g.
MSI is also showing a handful of previously announced 10-inch tablets in its booth. They include the WindPad 110W, which runs Advanced Micro Devices’ “Brazos” Fusion processor and Microsoft’s Windows 7 Home Premium OS. The 110W should be in stores by the end of June, Chen said. Pricing for that product was not available.