Sunday, July 3, 2011

New 7-Inch Sharp Galapagos Tablet On Its Way

Sharp seems to be readying another one of their entries into the tablet wars. A first look at a 7-inch Android tablet which will be marketed under its Galapagos brand name is already available. The 7-inch size comfortably puts it in between Sharp’s other offerings in the tablet market, which are at 5.5- and 10.8-inches respectively. It’s already undergoing review at the FCC – though the details are a bit sketchy. The only confirmed bit of data is that it will come with a WiFi-radio.

This means that the upcoming Android tablet will probably be not packing 3G/4G radio – limiting its Internet options. Be prepared that this tablet will most likely not have built-in mobile broadband. Still, Sharp can deliver the option at a future launch date. This could be a good thing though. WiFi-only models are notoriously cheap and in the current competitive tablet market, a price point can seriously help a tablets chances. A good example of why this is important is what happened to the Motorola Xoom, which had 3G and was later hardware-upgradable to 4G LTE at a later point for free. It was tagged at $799 – which made it seem too expensive against the $500 price tag of a 16 GB WiFi-only iPad. Although Motorola came out with a cheaper WiFi-version, the damage had already been done.

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