Vizio's 8-inch Gingerbread tablet hits shelves, doubles as a sub-$300 remote

Vizio's 8-inch tablet hit shelves in various retailers including Sam's Club, Wal-Mart, Costco, and Amazon, for a pretty affordable price of $299. The Gingerbread tablet features a heavily customized version of Google's platform, but it also doubles as a universal remote control. Basically, controlling your home entertainment happens via a built-in infra-red blaster, but the tablet also sports 3 speakers with SRS True Media sound, so it's quite capable as a remote control, but heck - you'd expect that for a $300 RC.

Going back in time, we can notice that Vizio's tablet has stripped a big chunk of its initially projected price - first it was spotted costing $399 for pre-orders, while in June we heard rumors about the slate getting a $349 price. It seems that competition has pushed that boundary even lower, which is more than welcome news for buyers.

So what do you get for your money? The chip powering the tablet is clocked at 1GHz and works along with 512MB of RAM. The 8-inch capacitive touchscreen screen has a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. The Vizio slate also features a front facing VGA camera, which rounds up the spec sheet.

Despite featuring Gingerbread, which is not specifically optimized for tablets, the Vizio 8 incher has seen some heavy customization with Vizio's VIA Plus interface and it does support the Android Market, which turns it into a fully functional tablet. Connectivity is well covered with GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, microHDMI and microUSB, while the 2GB of internal storage are expandable through a microSD card. With the promise of a solid 10hrs “of normal use,” this seems like a legitimate alternative to mainstream tablets for those on a tight budget. Not convinced? Feel free to check out the video demo below to get a better idea about the tablet and don't hesitate to share your opinions about this super-sized remote/tablet in the comments below.

source: Vizio via Costco