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Prepare to slap your jingling rear end, for supermarché Asda is now the exclusive retailer of the Arnova 8 Android tablet, which costs a mere £99.
Sporting an Archos design, the Arnova 8 is an 8-inch tablet with 4GB of storage, built-in Wi-Fi and a battery manly enough to handle 25 hours of music playback. It also packs a satanic 666MHz processor, a solitary USB port and weighs half a kilogram.
The tablet has a resistive touchscreen, so it won’t feel as slick and smooth as devices like the iPad and HP TouchPad. The Arnova 8 also runs Android 2.1, which is an old version of the mobile-phone edition of Android. You might say the software has been ‘rolled back’ in fact. See what we did there?
That old version of Android is limiting. You won’t be able to play Flash video in the Arnova 8’s Web browser, and loads of more current, exciting apps wouldn’t work even if you could access the Android Market — which you can’t.
Still, you could surf the Internet, and, if you loaded the tablet with video, it might play back smoothly enough. But, with no camera and limited features, we’re not convinced that the Arnova 8 is indeed the ‘electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife’, as the press release states.
Then again, it does have a built-in email client, giving it one up on the BlackBerry PlayBook. Schwing!
What do you think? Would you accept fewer features if it meant your tablet cost only £99? Or is it better to save up and fondle something a little slicker? Let us know your deepest, innermost thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook wall.
