Huawei introduces first 7-inch Android 3.2-powered tablet

Huawei announces the MediaPad, a 7-inch tablet that will be the first on the market to ship with Android 3.2 built in.

Who cares about Android version 3.1 anymore? 3.2 is the new hotness. The next update to Google‘s mobile operating system hasn’t been released yet, but it will be soon, installed into an upcoming 7-inch tablet from Huawei.

The 7-incher is Huawei’s MediaPad, a press release reveals. The company tells Engadget that the upcoming Android update is pretty much the same thing as Android 3.1, only it’s built to play well with the tablet display’s smaller size. Android version 3.x, dubbed Honeycomb is exclusive to tablets, only a handful of which are available right now. So 3.2 simply scales that experience down a bit.

The tablet itself sports a half-inch thick shell and weighs slightly less than one pound. On the inside you’ve got a dual-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm processor, a 1.3 MP front-facing camera, a 5 MP rear-facing camera that can do HD video recording, an HSPA+ wireless receiver for 3G wireless, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Flash 10.3 support. Battery life clocks in at around six hours. The 7-inch LCD touchscreen can also handle 1080p HD video playback, and can send that content out to an external display through a built-in HDMI port. The MediaPad isn’t a beast, but it can certainly compete so long as the price is right.

No price is revealed in the release — nor is any information about how much RAM there is — but the device is expected to start shipping in the third quarter of this year. There are apparently no plans to release a Wi-Fi-only model, Engadget adds. For comparison, Huawei’s budget-priced S7 tablet, which runs on Android 2.1, can be gotten for around $250.