Samsung has just announced the Galaxy Tab3 Lite—a product that looks to be aimed at the very bottom of the Android tablet barrel. While no price has been announced, the specs put it in the range of the cheap, no-name (usually terrible) Chinese Android tablets you might find on the bottom shelf of a department store electronics aisle.
The Tab3 Lite has a 7-inch 1024×600 display, an unspecified 1.2GHz dual-core processor, and 1GB of RAM. The device has 8GB of storage and a microSD slot, which you will probably need, as Samsung's software usually takes up at least 2GB of space.There's a 3600 mAh battery, which Samsung says should be good for eight hours of video playback, and it supports Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0. The "Lite" in "Tab3 Lite" is meant to communicate that the device includes only the bare essentials—there isn't even a front-facing camera—only a rear 2MP sensor.
This thing is cheap, but the question is "how cheap?" The six-month-old Galaxy Tab3 can be had for $140, and it has a front-facing camera, a better rear camera, a bigger battery, and an IR blaster. With so many things downgraded and removed, it looks like Samsung is trying to build a tablet as cheaply as possible. We're expecting this device to come in at under $100, which would for the first time let Samsung take on the cheapest tablets out there, like the $60 "HKC" tablet sold in Walmart. While we aren't sure if Samsung can get the price that low, customers may pay a little more for the Samsung brand name. With a sub-$100 price, Samsung would probably sell these by the truckload.
The device will be eventually be available "globally" in black and white, with optional 3G connectivity. There's no release date yet, but with a posting on Samsung's official blog, the device can't be too far away.
