High street store Argos has announced it'll commence selling an own-branded Android tablet later this week for the rather modest expenditure of £99.99.
Following last month's launch of the £119.99 Tesco Hudl, the catalogue store has responded with the 7-inch MyTablet, which it hopes will snare tablet-hungry shoppers in the run up to Christmas.
The slate will come with 8GB of storage (compared with the Hudl's 16GB), run on Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 and arrive with apps like Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter and the BBC iPlayer built in.
As one would expect for such a low cost device, the rest of the specs are pretty modest. There's a 1024 x 600 LCD display and a 1.6GHz dual core processor doing the hard labour. Battery life is listed at 5-hours.
The camera specs aren't anything to write home about either, but at a penny under £100 there are few who'll care about the 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera and the 2-megapixel rear snapper.
Feeding the tablet-less
Argos will hope the MyTablet, which also features its own shopping app as standard, enjoys the same success as the supermarket's Hudl tablet.
Tesco shifted 35,000 units in the first two days on sale, which may not be up to iPad or Nexus 7 standards, but it's certainly noteworthy.
John Walden, Argos' managing director, said: "Millions of people have bought tablets during the last year but there is still around 75% of the UK population without one. We know that tablets will feature heavily on Christmas lists this year."
Despite beating Tesco on price, Argos' machine will have to go some to out-hustle the Hudl, which earned a very respectable four-star review in our recent test.
