ASUS has the opportunity of becoming the biggest Android tablet maker, thanks to cool models like the Transformer series, the ASUS PadFone 2 and obviously the Nexus 7. And now there’s supposedly a new niche product that may come soon. It’s rumored that the people at ASUS are preparing to launch a 7 inch tablet in South Africa.
This is certainly no Nexus 7, as far as specs go. The tablet is supposedly called ME-172V and it comes with a 7 inch 1024 x 600 pixel display, a WonderMedia WM8950 processor, ARM Mali 400 GPU and 1 GB of RAM. There’s also 8 GB of storage and the product will also bring a front 1 megapixel camera, a 4270 mAh battery and a microSD card slot. The tablet is expected to ship in early 2013 and come packed with Android Jelly Bean on board.
It’s not yet clear if this model will run Android 4.1 or 4.2 and as far as pricing goes, we’re expecting here a price of about 2000 Rand in South Africa, converted to about $226 in USA. The pricing is pretty steep, if you consider that the Nexus 7 is $199, but maybe it will manage to get better offers through subsidies.
