Toshiba announced a 7-inch Windows 8.1 tablet for just $120
The price war in the tablet sector has entered a new stage. Microsoft has kept its promise to deliver more affordable products based on Windows 8.1 with Bing as a default search engine. At this week’s IFA 2014 in Berlin, Microsoft and Toshiba opened a new battlefield against Google presenting the first of many upcoming aggressively priced tablets.
Toshiba Encore Mini rocks a 7-inch display with a resolution of just 1024 x 600 pixels. The processor inside is a quad-core Intel Atom, while the onboard storage is 16 GB but you can expand it through a microSD card. So, this is a pretty low-end device on paper, but what’s important here is the price of just $119.99 and the fact that the Encore Mini is the smallest tablet so far to run a full Windows version. Toshiba Encore Mini is now available for purchase through key US retailers or direct from Toshiba’s webstore.
With Microsoft offering free Windows OS to manufacturers we can expect these cheap Windows tablets to become even more common in the near future. Toshiba is one of Microsoft’s key hardware partners and flooding the market with low-priced tablets can help Microsoft battling against Android.
Asus also revealed a new Windows 8.1 tablet in Berlin, so we have a new 8-inch model called Iconia Tab 8 W. This model also comes with a subscription for Office 365 Personal for one year. Tab W 8 costs $150 with sales starting from November in North America and from October in Europe (for 149 EUR).