Next to relaunch its media tablets by December

BY DECEMBER high street retailer Next will launch refreshed versions of its Media Tablet products following a less than stellar reception of its 10-inch model in October.

By early October, criticisms of the 10-inch tablet it launched in late September included slow touchscreen response, a mere 30 minutes of battery time surfing the web and software that displayed messages in Chinese. With only a couple of websites and The Guardian reporting the 10-inch version's availability, no one reported the 7-inch's existence. The tablets seemingly were not so much soft-launched but sleep-walked into the fashion shop's website.

Next told The INQUIRER that the 7-inch model weighs 350g, its display is a "Full Mirror Face" resistive touchscreen TFT LCD with 800x400 resolution, it has an unidentified 300MHz processor, 2GB of internal storage, Android 1.6, one USB 2.0 port, an integrated microphone and stereo speakers and it has a microSD slot able to support up to 32GB. It sells for just £99, making it as cheap as some feature phones.

The specifications sheet for the Next 10-inch tablet says that it is 625g heavy, its WXGA LCD touchscreen has 1024x600 resolution, it's powered by a 1GHz LNX Code 11 processor with 256MB of DDR2 RAM, has 2GB of internal storage, a microSD slot, 802.11b/g WiFi, a g-sensor a USB 2.0, an Ethernet port, a 3.5mm audio jack, stereo speakers, runs the Android 2.1 OS, and its lithium-ion battery life is up to 3 hours "depending on usage". It sells for £180, making it the least expensive 10-inch tablet we've seen so far.

Based on its LNX Code 11 processor for the 10-inch and the specification similarities of both that model and the 7-inch version, the Next tablets appear to be rebranded Elonex products.

No specification details have been made available about the refreshed tablets, but Next told The INQUIRER, "We will be relaunching an improved version of the tablet responding to criticism of various features. This will be available in around 3 weeks - so whilst we have virtually sold out we will be restocking with an improved version shortly." µ