BenQ jumping into tablet game with Android-based R100
updated 07:40 am EST, Fri December 24, 2010
BenQ R100 Android tablet coming early 2011
BenQ this week said it too would get involved with tablets early in 2011. The R100 will have a 10-inch, 1024x600 screen and ship with an unspecified version of Android. It would only have an 833MHz Samsung processor but would consequently get up to 12 hours of battery life for reading, PCWorld was told.
Books, magazines and newspapers would be the focus as a whole. It would support stylus input for notes in Chinese writing styles as well as English. BenQ hasn't mentioned whether the screen is capacitive or resitive and thus whether it would support multi-touch. The company would hope to sell it subsidized as part of a deal for subscriptions.
Other details would bring 8GB of storage with an SDHC card slot for up to 16GB more, a headphone jack, and both mini HDMI and mini USB ports for expansion. Wi-Fi is so far the only known networking option. The R100 would go on sale in at least Taiwan and mainland China, with prices to be set later. Its details suggest the device will be relatively low cost compared to most of its alternatives.
BenQ has previously dipped into tablet-style hardware before and was one of the chief advocates of Intel's Mobile Internet Device (MID) category with its own device (below). High prices, short battery life and relatively unoptimized interfaces ended up forcing BenQ and most others out of the category after poor sales.
