Aluratek is deviating from their normal business model which has been just selling e-ink based readers and jumping on the tablet PC bandwagon in April with their Cinepad Android 2.2 Tablet PC.
We first saw this tablet at CES 2011 in Vegas earlier on in the year and considering they had a fair ton of press information on it, they only had 1 copy for the entire trade-show.
The Cinepad will feature a 10.1 inch color capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1024×600 pixels. It has a 1 GHz Azpen processor, comes bundled with Google Android 2.2, and will have landscape and portrait mode support.
It will have all of the normal Android applications such as email, web browser and other common applications. It will not have access to the official Android Market but rumor has it this one will have Adobe Flash support. If listening to music is your thing it will have MP3, and WAV support for pictures you get BMP, JPG, and GIF picture formats.
It has built in WIFI internet support, so you can easily surf the web. The battery life is around 10 hours, so it fairs above average from most other entry level tablets we see. You have around 8 GB of internal memory and can further enhance it up to 32 GB via the MicroSD card. We are very happy to report it will have a USB 2.0 port so you can plug in your flash drive to access memory on the go. Initial reports say that it will only be able to read Fat16 and FAT32 sticks though.
It will be interesting to see how the content distribution platform works and how Aluratek will deliver ebooks to the device. It would make sense to partner with Amazon for the release, but nothing is confirmed.
The device is set to go on sale early April for around $299
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
