£50 Windows tablet with free Microsoft Office 365 goes on sale
But you will have to trade in a working tablet
Remember that affordable Windows tablet we saw almost five months ago in Taiwan at Computex? Well, it reached our shores.
The first batch of cheap Windows 8.1 tablets has finally landed at major online and offline retailers in the UK with prices starting from as little as £49.98 if you want have an existing tablet to swap.
The Linx 7 costs as little as £79.98 at Ebuyer but you can claim up to £30 bringing the price down to just under £50. How good is that deal?
Well, you get Windows 8.1 and Office 365 Personal for a start; that subscription is worth £50 on its own. The hardware is not THAT bad; a quad-core Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 32GB onboard storage, two 2-megapixel camera and a 7-inch 1280 x 800 pixel display.
Other than the system memory and the rear camera, the only other downside seems to be the lack of a HDMI port which would have allowed you to connect to an external display.
The Linx range also include an 8-inch model that's identical to the Linx 7 bar the larger screen and a slightly bigger battery capacity (it's also £20 more expensive) and a 10-inch model that has a larger screen (still the same resolution though), a bigger battery but also twice the RAM, twice the battery capacity and a HDMI port. It's also twice as expensive.
Cheap Windows tablets from little-known manufacturers are likely to be the untold success of this Christmas although their success could well make established brands nervous because the former are ready to live on very thin margins.
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Check out how a sub-£100 Windows 8 tablet performs in the real world.
Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.