While most of us cant’t even conceive buying an Android-based tablet manufactured by anyone else than the already established names in the industry (Samsung, Asus, Motorola, Acer, and a few others), some smaller firms are trying to carve themselves a niche in the still very young Android tablet market.
With a glorious history going back over 70 years and still one of the most important camera manufacturers in the world, Polaroid is not exactly a small company, but we surely didn’t expect it to get in the Android tablet business anytime soon.
However, it seems that Polaroid has some interesting plans for the near future, with an Android 4.0 slate coming very soon to a store near you. The PMID701i (yeah, I know, a horrible name, but it’s probably not definitive) has showed up on the FCC website and could be one of summer’s pleasant surprises. The PMID701i is actually not the first Polaroid Android-based tablet to come to our attention, with a series of similar gadgets officially unveiled back at the CES, but it will be the first one to come with ICS on board.
While it doesn’t exactly come with the best hardware around, Polaroid’s tablet will draw some attention by running ICS out of the box. As you probably all know (and are pissed about it), most Android-based slates out there are still stuck with Gingerbread or Honeycomb, and some big names don’t even have a planned Ice Cream Sandwich update for the near future.
Powered by a 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, the 7-incher will most likely sport a pretty mediocre 800 x 480 pixels resolution display and should feature 512 MB of RAM, as well as 4 GB of on-board storage, WiFi connectivity, and a microSDHC card slot.
There’s also talk about a battery supposed to go for about five or six hours between charges, so all in all, it’s pretty clear that we are not dealing with a high-end device. Then again, if this little guy will be priced according to its specs (maybe $150?), it might actually sell, once again due to the fact that it will come with ICS. On the other hand, we have to mention that Polaroid’s 7-incher won’t come with your regular access to the Google Play Marketplace, but instead with access to Amazon’s AppStore, which could be both a strong and a weak point.
What do you guys think, could a gadget like this interest you if it were to hit the market in, say, a month? Or do you think it would be too risky to go for a device manufactured by a company that in inexperienced in this field? Hit us back with a comment and let us know!
