Don’t get too excited about the $89 tablet he just heard about; it’s a single-core, 1.2 GHz tablet with a 4:3-ratio 800×600 screen. For $89, it’s fine, but I wouldn’t call it unexpected, and certainly not revolutionary. It’s a couple hundred megahertz faster than the $79 tablets at Big Lots, and has 120 more pixels in one direction.
His analysis certainly seems plausible. We already have families toting multiple smartphones–I still get puzzled looks when I tell people my wife and I share a smartphone–so there’s little reason to think families won’t get multiple tablets. We have two, if you want to count that–my wife has an Ipad, and I have my hacked Nook Color. I’ll continue to use the hacked Nook Color for watching videos and/or reading documents even after I buy something more capable. With any luck, that might be this month.
The Nook Color gets a little laggy for running some apps, which shouldn’t be too surprising since it’s less powerful than even the $79 tablets today. But it’s still usable for media-consumption tasks.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.