Velocity Micro will join MIPS Technologies in showing off low-cost tablets running Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Chip maker MIPS Technologies teamed with Ingenic to launch the $100 Novo7 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet in China. That 7-inch slate is powered by a 1GHz CPU from MIPS and will be displayed at the show next week.
Velocity Micro will tout two tablets next week at the show: the 7-inch Cruz Tablet T507 for less than $150 and the 9.7-inch Cruz Tablet T510, for which pricing will be under $250. Both machines support Flash Player 11, the multimedia software Adobe is phasing out for mobile devices in favor of HTML5.
The T507 includes a Cortex A8 1.2GHz CPU and ARM Mali 400MHz 3D graphics acceleration, along with 512MB of double data rate type three (DDR3) RAM. The slate also has 8GB of internal storage, the same as Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire, though less than the 16GB and 32GB options for Samsung's $399 Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus machine.
There is also a front-facing camera, High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) port and access to Kindle for Android, and QuickOffice Full. Interestingly, Velocity Micro opted to offer consumers access to Amazon's Appstore for Android Apps instead of Google's own Android Market.
The 9.7-inch Cruz Tablet T510 offers the same features and functionality of its smaller brother, but is only 0.35 inches thick. Both tablets are expected to launch later this quarter.
The Ice Cream Sandwich tablets come after tablets based on Google's Android 3.x Honeycomb branch largely failed to generate interest in 2011, thanks to early bugginess and the lackluster launch of the Xoom slate from Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MOT).
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Ice Cream Sandwich Tablet Coming at CES: Velocity Micro
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