Asus skips CES, announces $150 MeMo Pad tablet

By Joshua Sherman January 13, 2013

Check out our review of the Asus MemoPad HD7 tablet.

CES may be done, but Asus isn’t. Two days after the annual trade show ended, it has announced the MeMo Pad, an Android tablet that will cost a mere $150.

The MeMo Pad, as stated in a Asus press release, has been released as an answer to “Changing market conditions”, which we think is a code word for lower prices. So far, several low-cost tablets are entering or already on the market in 2013, such as Acer’s own Iconia tablet.

At a modest $150, you could probably guess this tablet is not coming to a store near you with the latest and greatest hardware. Despite this, Asus has worked hard to cram a ton of features and fairly decent hardware into this device. With a 1GHz processor, the CPU of the MeMo Pad is certainly not turning heads, but Asus is throwing in a standard 7-inch display, 1GB of RAM, and your choice of 8 or 16 GB of internal storage, plus a microSD card to maximize your investment. The real treat is that this tablet will come with Android Jelly Bean, rather than the now-dated taste of Ice Cream Sandwich, not to mention three different casing colors for your own personal flair. With an advertised 7-hour battery life, Asus isn’t going overboard in the battery department, but still giving decent performance. This tablet may not catch glances anywhere beyond its price and color options, but certainly no complaints either.

Compared to other tablets on the market, the MeMo Pad certainly isn’t the cheapest you can get, but it certainly is (along with Acer and a few others) one of the cheapest tablets you can get with a real brand name. The MeMo Pad is probably a good choice against Acer’s Iconia or any other brand-name 150 dollar tablet – not that there are many others out there to begin with. You certainly can’t do much better with a price like that. Asus has plans to launch it sometime in January to emerging markets, but you can grab in America some time in April – even if it will be grossly outdated by then.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Joshua Sherman is a contributor for Digital Trends who writes about all things mobile from Apple to Zynga. Josh pulls his…

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