Velocity Micro Announces $150 Ice Cream Sandwich Tablet

The CES shower of Ice Cream Sandwich tablets has begun. Today Velocity Micro announced the Cruz T507 and Cruz T510, two low-cost tablets that will run Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich."

The Cruz T507 is the first ICS tablet we've seen for under $150. It has pretty basic specs, as you'd expect for something at this price point: a 1.2-GHz single-core, Cortex-A8 processor, an 800-by-480 LCD screen, 512MB of RAM, and 8GB of storage plus a MicroSD card slot. It lacks the Android Market or Google's apps, offering the Amazon AppStore instead. The tablet has a single VGA front-facing camera, and an HDMI output port. Velocity Micro is pretty hacker-friendly, too, so expect this tablet to be relatively easily modded.

The slightly larger Cruz T510 is a slim tablet, only 0.35 inches thick, with a 9.7-mm screen. It adds a VGA rear-facing camera and boosts the screen resolution to 1024-by-768; otherwise, it's pretty much the same inside as the T507. Velocity Micro said the tablet will cost under $249.

Both tablets will come out "mid to late Q1," according to Velocity Micro's Josh Covington.

Best known as a maker of high-quality, value-priced PCs, Velocity Micro has also made e-readers and Android tablets for a few years now. We reviewed the company's and criticized it for having a low-quality screen, old OS, and lack of Google apps. The OS problem seems to be solved on the new tablets; we'll see how the screens hold up, and a few missing Google apps may be a price extreme penny-pinchers are willing to pay.

For more, see and the slideshow below.