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ZTE launches affordable 7-inch Light Tab II tablet, with 3G

Light on your wallet

ZTE launches affordable 7-inch Light Tab II tablet, with 3G
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A day after Samsung announced a new 7-inch tablet with Ice Cream Sandwich, ZTE has come along with an even cheaper offering: the ZTE Light Tab II (also known as the V9A).

Sold under ZTE's own brand name, the Light Tab II will be considerably more affordable than the Samsung, with a combined 3G / wi-fi model retailing for just £235. However, you do only get 4GB of integrated storage and you will have to stump up for a separate memory card if you want any more.

There's a lower-resolution display on ZTE's new tablet, too, (1024x600 pixels compared to the Galaxy Tab 2's 1280x800 screen) and no Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich. The tablet ships with Gingerbread (Android 2.3), more commonly found on smartphones than the latest-generation of tablets.
Everything runs from a single-core processor clocked at 1.4GHz, but before you write it off entirely, that's the same Qualcomm processor you'll find inside a Sony Ericsson Xperia arc S or Nokia Lumia 800, so there's no reason to believe it won't be able to keep up.

The Light Tab II also has a 3-megapixel camera at the back and a VGA cam for video calling on the front.

Measuring 202x122x12.6mm and weighing 402g, it's not ultra-slim but nor is it overly heavy. A 3400mAh battery offers up to 300 hours of standby, with 5.5 hours of usage based on video playback.

It's hardly a tablet to consider as an alternative to whatever Apple has planned with the iPad 3, but you can be sure of one thing with the Light Tab II: it's going to be one of the cheapest 3G-enabled tablets around when it goes on sale at the end of February.

Jonathan Morris
Jonathan Morris
From starting out as a games tester for Mastertronic, Virgin and Sega in the late 1980s, it may seem odd to then ditch everything to write about mobile phones that, at the time, lasted 20 minutes between charges. He always had a hunch mobiles would become quite popular, but possibly didn't realise how powerful (and, ironically, returning to 20 minutes between charges). Jonathan's job is to continue advising on the best hardware to buy, in order to enjoy games that have advanced considerably since those long days and nights testing Double Dragon on the C64.