Microsoft’s announced that the 8″ Pendo Pad 8 will go on sale in Australia through Target on Thursday the 25th of September for $199. That’s a real budget buy, but will it be any good?
Pendo already make a number of budget Android tablets sold through Target stores, so it’d pay to make sure you’re buying the right thing when you line up. The Windows Pendo Pad has some interesting potential, although it’s a low-specification product.
Microsoft’s official release notes that it has an 8″ display, 16GB of onboard storage and 1GB of RAM, mini HDMI output and a one year Office 365 Personal subscription. Pendo’s site details that the screen is 1280×800 running on an Intel Atom Bay Trail Z3735 1.83GHz processor with 2MP front and rear cameras.
Or in other words, at $199 that you’re not getting a top-end kind of product. You buy budget tech, you get budget results — although the Pendo Pad 8 does have one nice value hook.
The inclusion of Office 365 is the real sweetener to this deal, as it typically runs around $73 by itself, making this (effectively) a $126 Windows 8.1 Tablet with office compatibility. I’ve also asked Microsoft about getting hold of an evaluation unit, so stay tuned.