Tomorrow a new type of tablet will enter the Australian market: the affordable Windows tablet. The Pendo Pad will run you a meagre $200 from Target and other retailers. This is a price-tag that has until now been the domain of Android slates alone. It’s about time there was a little competition.
The Pendo Pad 8 will come with Windows 8.1 pre-installed, running on an Intel-made quad-core 1.8GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. On-board storage is 16GB and, unfortunately, there is no mention of microSD or SDXC slots for expanding that any further.
The 8 inch display has a resultion of 1280 x 800, which is better than 720p but well short of full 1080p HD. The front and rear cameras are both 2MP, begging the question of why they even bothered with the rear cam, and it has Bluetooth connectivity.
Why is this a big deal?
Well, “big” is a relative term and let’s not get carried away. Even so, a $200 Windows tablet is an interesting prospect. Not even Apple has tried to take on this price-bracket yet, despite its proving incredibly popular with the Amazon Kindle Fire and Google Nexus series of tablets.
A new competitor – one running on an entirely different ecosystem – has the potential to offer customers a totally different experience for the same price.
The only problem is that Windows tends to be a pretty bulky OS. It takes up a lot of hard drive space and requires a decent amount of power to run smoothly. The Pendo Pad may not be able to cut it.
Seeing as the tablet goes on sale tomorrow you probably won’t have to wait long for a review which, by the way, we very strongly suggest you do. Considering the track history of low-specced Windows tablets, it’ll be best to read up on how the Pendo Pad performs before dropping your hard-earned money on one.
Alex Angove-Plumb
Digital Content Editor
