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Hands-On Test With the Dirt-Cheap CherryPad Tablet

Posted by timothy on from the stocking-stuffers dept.

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."

6 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Holy design, Batman. by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Considering it's a scam and will never ship I don't think Apple will have to go too far to stop them.

  2. Re:Holy design, Batman. by bmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And you think that Apple's design and form factor of the iPad is somehow groundbreaking?

    Go read the paper on the Dynabook concept from the 70s. Right down to the capacitive screen.

    There is no intellectual property here. All the big thinking was done 40 years ago at PARC.

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    BMO

  3. Re:slate ? I prefer to buy a tablet. by robogun · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IBM and Lenovo have been making ThinkPad computers since 1992, but Jobs probably would try for it anyway.

  4. Re:Cherrypal scam? by zombie_striptease · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I ordered their Africa netbook as a gift for someone last spring. The "Linux" version was actually Windows CE with all the windows logos scrubbed. Cute trick :P

    Also it loaded from flash instead of having an actual BIOS, so attempting to install my own OS was non-trivial. They're false-advertising bastards to be sure.

  5. Do not purchase from this company by LurkersA · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do not purchase from this company. I ordered one of their $99 netbooks earlier in the year, and it never showed up. I tried to contact the company via email and phone on several occasions and no contact was ever made. My bank eventually reversed the transaction, but it was still a major pain in the ass. Google yields plenty of results for people with similar experiences from this company.

  6. Re:resistive? by moonbender · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've got a phone with a resistive screen, and all those advantages don't mean much, because it's just not much fun to use with your fingers. You have to press really hard, and ideally with your fingernails. Other people using my phone have a really hard time getting it to work at all.

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