Lowest Priced Top Notch Anroid 4.0 7" Tablet Ever?

POLAROID ANRDOID TABLET - HIDDEN GEM OR HUNK OF JUNK?

I was perusing Walgreen's yesterday and I stumbled on something in the front of the store where they place impulse items. It was a 7" multi-touch Android 4.0 tablet made by none other than Polaroid.

My first thought was that it must be a complete piece of junk, like similar "Walgreens tablets" that have been introduced in the past with resistive touch screens and older versions of the Android operating system.

But curiosity got the best of me after looking at the list price of $129.99, so I picked it up and flipped it over to see what crappy specs the device might have. What I found was quite a surprise.

This little booger not only had Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich pre-installed, but it had a capacitive multi-touch display, 800x600 screen resolution, 4Gb of internal memory, an SD card slot, a front-facing camera, support for 3D games, plus native Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube apps.

I thought it was too good to be true, so I looked at more details on the device and found it to have 512Mb of RAM and a 1GHz cpu under the hood. The actual manufacturer is Southern Telecom, a name I had not heard of.

After discovering all of these details, I started to wonder, "how has this not been drawing any media attention?" Perhaps it's a buggy device. Maybe it can't push video well. Or maybe it has low-end construction with poor QA/QC.

But what if it is actually a good device? At this price, even having moderate functionality would make this a best-seller. At least in my mind it would be. I mean, it hasn't been too long since the world sat and waited for the first legitimate color touch screen tablet to break the $199 barrier.

But that's not the end of the story... apparently, if you register for free as a preferred customer on the Walgreens website, you can buy the device for only $89.99. How can this not be worth the risk, for such a cheap price?

Will this unit sell out rapidly? Will it become a smash hit for the holiday season? Or will people buy truckloads of these tablets only to return them to Walgreens the next week because they are junk?

I read lots of reviews on Amazon.com about this device, and the opinions vary widely. It seems like there are more positive ratings than average to low ratings. After digging in deep and reading as many ratings as I could stand, I'm still befuddled about this thing.

I am personally going to give myself 7 days before I break down and buy one, just to find out if it is a legitimate tablet. If I can read eBooks and blogs, watch videos on Youtube, and stream Netflix without problems, I would call this the best value for a tablet on the market today. And a good buy.

Stay tuned, you might be hearing more about this. And if you actually own one of these and have an unbiased review to share, please shout it out in the Disqus comments section below and stop me before I blow $89.99!

Carlton Flowers
Tablet Gambler