This morning I came across another cheap 7″ Android 4.0 tablet to add to the heap. It’s called the Hipstreet Titan, and like most other cheap Android tablets it sells for around $100 in the US and Canada from stores like Best Buy and Walmart.
The Hipstreet Titan has the usual budget tablet specs: a 7-inch 800 x 480 resolution screen, 4GB of storage, 512MB of RAM, a microSD card slot (if they can do it why can you, Google), and a 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor.
It also has a front-facing camera, built-in speaker, headphone jack, and micro USB port. There’s no mention of an HDMI port or USB host, however. If you shop around you could find something like the IdolPad Plus with the same exact specs but with those added features for the same price or less.
Unfortunately the Hipstreet tablet doesn’t come with access to the Google Play store. Instead it comes with the SlideMe market for apps, which has about 15% of the total apps of Google’s appstore.
Luckily it looks like there’s an easy hack to add the Google Play store to the Hipstreet Titan. I came across this thread at the Tablet Republic with directions that will reportedly work with this tablet. The script download is in section #3 for version 4.0.3+, called newtech25.
It’s amazing how many different cheap 7″ Android 4.0 tablets there are on the market right now. All have the same basic specs with subtle variations. And most seem to hover around the $100 mark.
It will be interesting to see what kind of impact better tablets like the Google Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire 2 that go for $199 will have on the budget market. By Christmas these types of budget tablets like the Hipstreet Titan could fall to the sub-$75 mark.
Wow. The “Hipstreet Titan.” What a name haha. The Google Nexus 7 will not have an MicroSD card slot, but the “Hipstreet Titan” does…
If Idolian would be willing to add $60-$100 to their price point for higher quality parts and a higher resolution screen, they would be the best cheap Android tablet maker, hands down. Their massive selection of ports and pre-rooted OS gives them an edge over the rest of the no frills tabs.
I’m wondering when e-ink reader manufacturers are going to spring for a faster, more capable processor similar to the ones being used in these cheap tablets.
Both the Kobo Touch and the much discussed Onyx Boox M92 use the 800 MHz Freescale i.MX508 processor. I’ve found my Kobo to be quite slow when searching large epub libraries or doing pretty much anything that doesn’t involve simple page turns. So I have some fear that the M92 would be just as bad for overall speed.
And yet we see a cheap tablet like this one using a 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor. I’m not exactly a hardware guy (so there might be a lot more to it than raw processor speed) but what’s with the weak processors in e-ink devices relative to tablets?
@Damon I totally agree. It must take 30+ seconds for the Kobo Touch to start up, and I’m not sure why. My Kindle 3 turns on instantly.
I have the Titan 2 tablet and I want toddlers a app on the main screen that I book marked,but I can’t find how to delete it, if anyone knows ,can you please let me know how to do it lol