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Hands-On Test With the Dirt-Cheap CherryPad Tablet
MojoKid writes "A small company out of Palo Alto, CA — Cherrypal — made headlines recently with the announcement of their dirt-cheap $188 CherryPad tablet. The CherryPad is a 7-inch slate that comes preloaded with the Android 2.1 operating system and is driven by an 800MHz ARM11-based processor by Samsung, backed by a meager 256MB of DDR2 system memory. The device is also based on a resistive touch display, so it takes a bit of getting used to, if you've been working with devices like the iPhone or similar, where capacitive touch displays are ubiquitous. Just what does $188 buy you in an Android tablet? In short, the CherryPad falls down a bit where Cherrypal decided to cut corners from a cost perspective. The device needs another 256MB of RAM (for 512MB total) and a higher quality touch screen (perhaps a 1GHz CPU?) and that would have likely pushed its price northward a bit to be sure."
I'm not saying that this price range is out of the question, just that, as noted in another post in this thread, Cherrypal has a history of not shipping orders.
warning goatse
Hmmm... I've been using the with a81E for a month now, and it's been reasonably good. Decent build quality, for a Chinese device. Andeoid 2.2 works like a charm, pretty responsive on the ARM Cortex-A8 cpu. Stability and battery life is still an issue, they cant seem to figure out how to get even the battery-level meter working. IMHO, it's a firmware version or two away from being ready for primetime. Also, on it's resistive touchscreens, i have to say it's emminently usable, IF you calibrate it properly. I once messed up the calibration so bad, i had to re-flash :)