Asus wholesale android tablets up for pre-order for $149-Priceangels.com

The new Google wholesale android tablets offers some pretty great hardware for a reasonably low price of $229. But if you don’t need a 1080p display or a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and want to save some money, there’s a cheaper option.The same company that manufactures the Nexus 7 for Google has a new model called the Asus MeMO Pad HD 7. While the name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it’s a 7 inch tablet with a quad-core processor, a decent display, and a low $149 price tag.

Introduced in June, the tablet is now available for pre-order in the US.The tablet comes in a variety of colors including pink, blue, black, white, and green. Each model has a 7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display, a MediaTek ARM Cortex-A7 quad-core processor, front and rear cameras, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and a microSD card slot.

While this is a budget tablet, it shows that low-cost Android tablets have come a long way in the past few years. AnandTech reviewed the new MeMo Pad HD 7 recently and found that it’s almost as good as last year’s Nexus 7 tablet, but it sells for $50 less.

Compare that with the first $150 Android tablet to hit the US in 2010. The Augen GenTouch78 had an awful display, a slow processor, and was barely usable.In February, Android CEO Stephen Elop said that the company was looking "very closely" at tablets but had nothing to announce yet. In May, Jo Harlow, executive vice president of smart devices for Android, also teased the notion, saying: "We're very interested in tablets and that's an area we're looking at."Ced2dxdS

Android reportedly had plans to develop a 10-inch tablet outfitted with Windows RT. But the company decided to nix it in favor of one running the full version of Windows 8, The Verge said earlier this month.Android is currently testing a tablet among different carriers, multiple sources told WP Central. If that's true, the company could coincide the launch of a tablet with the release of Windows 8.1, which should reach consumers not too long after the summer ends.

And although the new tablet is the first to ship with android 4.0 tablet, it's available to download on other devices, including last year's Nexus 7.What the new tablet does offer is the promise of a longer battery life - up to 10 hours for Web surfing and nine hours for video streaming. Last year's model was rated at eight hours.

Android is good in that many apps designed for a phone's smaller screen are automatically adapted to take advantage of a tablet's larger screen. On the iPad, apps that aren't optimized for it are squeezed into a smaller window the size of an iPhone. Blow it up to full screen, and it looks distorted. But that's not as glaring on the Mini as it is on the full-size iPad. And having apps automatically change their layout isn't the same as designing them for the tablet from scratch, as is the case with the hundreds of thousands of apps optimized for the iPad.