With the immense growth in tablet options since the launch of Apple’s iPad last year, many consumers anticipate a more open and customisable generation of tablets to appear during this latest tech boom.
Gigabyte have seen an opening in the market and are gearing up for a product launch in October 2011 that offers the user the option to dual boot into either Android or Windows 7. While Windows 7 may not be the best possible option for a tablet, it is useful to many potential users that a fully fledged home computer operating system is available on a tablet device.
There are two SKUs planned with one possessing a 10” screen, and the other a 7”. The 7-inch device will unfortunately only run on Android 2.2- now made obsolete, Honeycomb or Windows 7but the 10” will offer booting options into Android 3.0 as well. The idea, says Richard Ma, senior vice president at Gigabyte, is to allow high end business users the option to edit their documents on the move. This option is currently quite limited on existing android tablet, the operating system not perhaps as suited to the extra screen real estate as the latest iterations of iOS are.
Expect Intel Atom processors inside both models without a USB port and a price of ‘less than $400.’ The company anticipate releasing a Windows 8 tablet before the year is through also.
