3 tablets you can buy for $99

By design or by fate, tablets have broken the $99 price tag. While what’s inside the $99 thing differs from piece to piece, these tablets raised quite a few expectations. LACS, a Bangalore based company has unveiled its $99 LACS Magnum. HP Touchpad which used to cost in excess of $400 is now available at $99. Yet another tablet in its simplest form is Noteslate. All the three tablets have a common thread : $99.

There were promises to bring tablets which are cheaper than $99 – like the $35 from HRD ministry of India. We are yet to see that and even if we did, it will not available for retail consumption. BEL has manufactured a tablet for $75, but that too is for a special purpose.

LACS Magnum Pepper

LACS Magnum Pepper is powered by Android 2.2 Froyo operating system, 800MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM. It has 7-inch resistive LCD touch screen with a resolution 800 x 480. 2GB in-built storage is present and can be expanded to 32 GB. WiFi, USB, LAN, and 3G compatibility (through a dongle) are on-board.

HP TouchPad

HP TouchPad comes with 9.7-inch touch screen display, 1.2 GHz dual core Snapdragon processor, webOS 3.0 operating system, WiFi, Blutooth and 16GB memory. You want more? There’s a front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera, VPN support and looks pretty slick too. In addition to that you can have a pet project of installing Android or Ubuntu on it.

Noteslate

This Noteslate tablet does just one thing and does it very well. It can take notes. That’s pretty much it. Noteslate costs $99 and comes in four different color contrasts. It cannot be used for web-browsing but can be used to read some pdf’s through a firmware upgrade. Noteslate has a 13-inch diagonal low-res display and the battery lasts for 180 hours. The notes taken on Noteslate can be synced to a computer either through WiFi or mini USB

The most desirable of these three $99 is obviously HP TouchPad for its superior specifications. Unfortunately for us, it is on the verge of being extinct.