Augen 7" Color Touchscreen Entertainment Tablet PC

New from $139 on Amazon

If CNet won’t buy one neither will I.

“In statements made to Laptop Magazine, Augen’s CEO Gary Gofman claims that the unauthorized inclusion of the Google Android Marketplace app on the Gentouch tablet was an unintentional mistake, and future production runs will not include the Google Mobile Services Application Suite. So yes, it was too good to be true.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20011864-1.html#ixzz1B56Unggp

Engadget Review

It’s only running 2.1, so no flash. Think I’m holding out for the Lenovo LePad or the Asus Transform.

Product website:

Trust me on this…don’t spend less than $250 on an Android tablet, until you’ve tried it out first, or at least watched a YouTube video of someone using one.

Laptop Magazine review – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUGm-uU0kYw

edit: If you want a good, reasonably priced Android tablet, I’d recommend picking up an Archos 70 or an Archos 101 (although it’s hard to find them in stock). I have a 101 and love it.

edit 2: If you want a really refined tablet computer today, your best (and only) bet is an iPad. If you can wait a bit, the Motorola XOOM will probably be great as well. None of the current Android tablets will have the polish of the iPad or XOOM, because none of the current Android OS releases are optimized at all for larger screens.

Great write up on the tablet. You know with gold at these prices screw finding the Arc find that golden calf.

Here’s an excerpt from the above link for those of us who are too lazy to make the jump:

Hardware: Just like some of the early videos indicated, the tablet is made entirely of black plastic. For $150 we can’t really knock the build quality of this thing, but we do have to say the $199 Archos 7 Home Tablet feels a lot sturdier and is also a bit thinner. Still, the Augen tablet is satisfactorily light and it’s easy to hold up to read a website or e-book. As we’ve said before, 7-inch tablets are an ideal size for holding in one hand. Oh, and as you will see in the gallery, Augen throws in a faux leather case – probably to hide the 78’s cheap aesthetic. Surrounding the tablet is a micro-USB port, a 2.5mm headphone jack (yeah, it’s a bummer!) and a microSD card slot. As for that headphone jack, Augen has told us that if you email them at support@augenus.com, they’ll send you a pair of 2.5mm headphones or some sort of adapter – cheers to that!
Screen: Come on, you’re not really shocked that the display is resistive and only has an 800 x 480 resolution, are you? For the price, we expected nothing more really, though in use it wasn’t as bad as we’d imagined. Obviously, you have to press pretty hard on the 7-inch display to make selections, but there’s also a stylus that pops out on the top of the tablet. We’ve actually defaulted to using the stylus, but a fingernail certainly gets the job done as well. Either way, resistive is, well, resistive. Also, you may notice in the pictures that there’s a slight gap between the glass of the screen and the actual display. There’s also no accelerometer or software for adjusting the screen orientation. No beating around the bush on this one: this screen is cheap, but then again so is the tablet.
Performance / Android experience: We actually have to give Augen some credit for shipping the Gentouch 78 with Android 2.1. It’s not 2.2 – though Augen says it may be upgradeable sometime – but at first boot we were greeted by a live wallpaper and shortcuts to the browser, YouTube, the Market, iReader, Skype and others. Basically, if you’re an Android user, you’ll feel quite at home. However, we cannot tell you how badly we wish there was a home and back button on the front of the device – there are a few cheap, very clicky buttons on the back, but it’s incredibly annoying to guess what each one does when you’re looking at the screen. The good news is that the GenTouch tablet is nowhere near as slow as the GenBook, but its 800MHz processor and 256MB of RAM makes Android smartphones, like the Droid X, Incredible and Evo 4G, look like Usain Bolt. As you see in the video, the application panel jiggers across the screen, scrolling is quite delayed and launching applications takes a noticeable few seconds. Still the tablet is capable of doing things like loading and watching YouTube videos as well as surfing the web, albeit on Hawaiian time. There’s 2GB of onboard memory, but the microSD slot should support up to 16GB cards.
Apps / Market access: So, yes, the Gentouch does come preloaded with the Google Market, but just as we experienced with the smartbook, applications won’t install. When we chatted with Augen, we were told that an update should restore access, though they also mentioned they’d be chatting with Google soon about the access. (We can’t imagine Google is all that happy that this company is shipping tablets with the Market preloaded.) However, Gmail and YouTube are both pre-installed on the device, and we have had no issues with either one. Skype, on the other hand, doesn’t work at all. We’ll be burning through our weekend trying to sideload some .apks, so stay tuned on how that all turns out. Augen tells us the updates for the store will appear on its support site.

Huh, that’s strange. When viewing the image of this tablet on my PC it looks normal. But when I load up Woot on my iPad, the tablet has “LOL POSER” added on top of it in stylish white letters. How odd. iPad, are you trying to tell me something?

Some devices just don’t know how to play nice and just get along…

This thing, while inexpensive, has no Android Market access, and has gotten multiple reviews of being slow and unresponsive.

Please note it says the App Store, NOT Android Market.

There is a 3rd party Android App commonly reffered to as the App Store and installed on all these knock off Chinese Android tablets.

I bought a similar knock off tablet running 1.6 from DinoDirect for about this same price and its a total POS.
Can’t load any of the latest apps, slow as molasses, and the battery lasts only about an hour. Notice there is no mention of expected battery life in the specs?

I would recommended you all steer clear of this one. Save your pennies and get an Archos is you want a cheap but decent Android Tablet. The Archos also has a small hacker community that have done things like enable Market access and other tricks.

so since this is just wi-fi, that means that I most likely won’t be able to use it in very many public places? it’s not 3G, i guess is what im asking?

Does it support flash?

I can’t speak from experience about this tablet, but as someone who’s bought a terrible tablet before, heed the reviews above (and below).

USB to Mini-USB Cable (for data transfers only) = no support for flash drives, external keyboards, etc.

I’ve also seen these on sale at Kmart for $99. This isn’t that great of a deal.

Forum with extra ROMs can be found here:

Flash requires Froyo (Android 2.2). This device only has 2.1.

If it gets upgraded, it might be able to run Flash.

Cons:
No Blue-tooth
Version 2.1
Not the real App Market

Pros:
Cheap
Expansion slot

I guess it would be too much to except this to stream netflix in some way ?

You’re going to see these things heavily discounted in the coming weeks and months before the newer models hit the market. You’d be better served waiting for the more refined models coming out shortly.The prices will be very competitive to grab market share.