Perhaps one of the biggest hurdles facing tablet adoption is price. Not everyone can justify spending $500+ on one, but thanks to the newly announced MSI WindPad Enjoy 7, they can get into the tablet game for half the price.

I met up with the folks at MSI at their Computex booth and they took me behind closed doors to show off two new additions to their family. We’ll start with the cheaper of the two. The Enjoy 7 is, as its name implies, a 7-inch tablet. They have it running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but they stayed mum on whether Honeycomb would eventually get sent to this device.

Power comes by way of an ARM Cortex A8 1.2GHz processor. The screen resolution is on the low side (800 x 480) and MSI doesn’t have licensing to use Android Market either. They’re working on a workaround, but I guess that’s the price you pay when you cut the MSRP down to $249. Lack of Android Market could be a deal breaker for many, even if they have “AppsLib App market [with] thousands of games supported.”

Basically the same deal applies to the 10-inch MSI WindPad Enjoy 10, except the screen gets a better resolution (1024×768). That gets bumped to $299. Realistically, though, spending an extra $100 on the Asus Eee Pad Transformer sounds like a better deal to us, regardless of whether you splurge to pick up the keyboard dock for the Transformer too.

Photos: Michael Kwan

The post How Can We Enjoy a Marketless MSI Android Tablet? appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Weighing in at just 1.6 and 1.76 lbs, it’s a wonder why MSI named their pair of tablet computers the “WindPad.”

The 10.1″ tablets both boast 10-point multitouch screens as opposed to the usual two-point, are only half and inch thick at their thinnest point, get eight to 10 hours of battery life and have an assortment of I/O ports, including USB and HDMI.

But this is where the WindPad branches into two options: The 100A or the 100W.

The 100A is the lighter of the two, runs Android and, for some reason, uses an unspecified ARM processor as opposed to the Intel Menlow Z530 you’ll find in the Windows-based 100W. You’ll only get the option of 3G connectivity with the Android version, as well as a digital compass and GPS.

If you go with the 100W, with a 32GB solid state hard drive and Windows 7 Home Premium as the OS, you’ll be stuck with WiFi as your only option for mobile connectivity as you schlep the extra quarter-pound around with you, but you get a superior processor as compared to its Android brother. Trivial? Possibly. Justifiable? I doubt it.

The tablets aren’t as cheap as we had anticipated, with the 100W slated to sell at about $500 at its release in the first quarter this year. And based on what little product specs MSI is giving out, they definitely aren’t the best tablets we’ve seen come out of this year’s CES.

[MSI]

The post MSI unveils pair of Android and Windows “WindPad” tablets appeared first on Mobile Magazine.