Lenovo outs IdeaPad A1 7-inch Gingerbread tablet

If the recent TouchPad ordeal is any indication, people want cheap tablets and Lenovo just showed the IdeaPad A1. Its not a $99 tablet, but it costs the easy $199 and you get more than a discontinued product running an OS with uncertain future.

Instead, the Lenovo IdeaPad A1 is a 7-inch tablet that runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and offers specs very similar to the original Samsung Galaxy Tab, for example. The 7-inch screen is an IPS-LCD unit with 600 x 1024 pixels resolution.

The A1 is powered by a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor and runs an almost untouched version of Gingerbread. There is just a Lenovo-made widget and a Lenovo app store. You’ll have access to the real Android Market too, so you get the hundreds of thousands of apps that Android has to offer. There’s also an offline mapping solution courtesy of Navdroyd.

Other specs for the IdeaPad A1 include a 3MP main camera and VGA secondary camera. The tablet is 10.1mm thick and weighs around 400g. Its a Wi-Fi only device, there is no Wi-Fi+3G version.