Novo7 tablet brings Ice Cream Sandwich on a budget

The Novo7 tablet is one of the first devices to launch running the Android 4.0 OS, better known as Ice Cream Sandwich, and it comes with a price tag of less than $100.

California-based MIPS technologies and Chinese CPU provider Ingenic Semiconductor jointly announced the release of the $100 (£64) Novo7 on Monday.

"We applaud Ingenic's accomplishment in developing this new high-performance, feature-rich Android 4.0 tablet, and offering it at a price point that makes it widely accessible," Sandeep Vij, chief executive of MIPS, said in a statement. "The openness of Android is enabling a new level of connectedness and interaction between devices and between people across the globe."

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The device, which is the one of the first tablets to officially run the Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Android operating system, is on sale now in China but will soon be making its way to the US and "other geographies within the next several months", albeit likely to be under a different brand name.

The low-cost tablet will arrive with a 7-inch capacitive multi-touch display, dual 2-megapixel cameras on the front and rear, an HDMI-out, USB2.0 port and 4GB of internal storage, which can be extended using a microSD card.

Under the bonnet, the Novo7 uses the Ingenic JZ4470 system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture that combines a 1GHz MIPS-based XBurst CPU and Vivante GC860 GPU which comes with support for 1080p video processing and OpenGL ES2.0, for better gaming performance.

Battery life is claimed at 25 hours when listening to music, six hours when surfing the web or six hours when playing games, according to the MIPS.

MIPS said that it will also be bringing 8-inch and 9-inch versions of the Ice Cream Sandwich-equipped tablet to market "soon".