Budget-friendly Acer Iconia B1-A71 to compete with $99 Nexus tablet

It appears that Acer too wants a share of the budget-friendly tablet market; a leak onGLBenchmark has revealed some of the specifications of a tablet known as Acer Iconia B1-A71. This tablet will compete directly with the rumoured budget offering from Asus, which is codenamed ME172V and tipped to be a Nexus tablet. The Acer Iconia B1-A71 has recently been cleared by the Federal Communications Commission and this tablet is believed to make its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show slated to take place in January 2013. From the GLBenchmark, a few details of the device have been revealed such as it will run on Android 4.1.2 and will feature a screen size of 1024 x 552 pixels which would translate it to an actual display size of 1024 x 600 pixels with a pixel density of 169 ppi. The processor noted here is 1.2GHz dual-core and the GPU is PowerVR SGX 531. According to a post on Benchmark.rs, this 7-inch offering from Acer will also come equipped with 512MB of RAM, 8GB of storage, a microSD card slot for storage expansion, GPS and Bluetooth 4.0. The thread also features some press shots of the tablet giving us a preview of what it will look like once it gets officially unveiled. Official image leaked online It appears that the budget Nexus from Asus, the ME172V, will face some serious competition from the likes of the Acer Iconia B1-A71.  For those of you who do not know what the Asus Me172V is about, it is a tablet that is believed to be a Nexus branded device with a 7-inch form factor. The tablet will come in black and white colour variants and will be priced between $129 to $149. This is a bit more expensive than the previously perceived price tag of $99. This low end tablet from Asus will feature a 7-inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels with a TN panel rather than an IPS panel, which means viewing angles will not be as great. The device now is believed to sport a VIA WM8950 chipset featuring a single Cortex-A9 core and Mali-400 GPU along with 1GB of RAM. The internal memory found here is said to be 16GB and as far as camera optics are concerned, the device will feature a 1.3MP camera. The last leak surrounding the $99 Nexus tablet came via a photograph on Picasa where a device from Asus, which goes by the codename ME172V, had made an appearance in the EXIF data. The EXIF data revealed that the resolution of the device is 1280 x 720 pixels. Apart from the features mentioned above, nothing else was revealed. In the benchmark that had appeared earlier this month, the Asus ME172V featured a 1GHz processor and a display with a resolution of 1025 x 600 pixels. The benchmark also revealed that it featured a Mali 400 GPU and runs on Android 4.1.1. There was no word on the number of cores found on the tablet, but if this device is to be categorised in the sub-$100 price range, we suspect it will be powered by a single-core processor. It now appears that a trend is slowly building where devices get revealed in benchmarks to create some hype before manufacturers actually take to the stage to announce its wares. However, at next year’s CES, we may see two potential competitors go head to head in the battle of the budget-friendly tablets.