Kindle Fire vs Lenovo IdeaPad A1

With all the hype and media focus on Amazon’s Kindle Fire and B&N’s Nook Tablet you may have missed the latest entry in to the 7 inch budget tablet market which comes from Lenovo with their new IdeaPad A1 which is selling for just $229. If you have been browsing around for a cheap tablet and like the idea of spending around $200 then you owe it to yourself to check out the new IdeaPad A1.

The first thing you will find is that Lenovo manages to pack so much more hardware in to their tablet. This might seem quite remarkable at first because many tear downs from big tech blogs have concluded that Amazon are losing money on each tablet they sell because the hardware costs are more than the $199 retail price but once you start to understand the technical specs of the IdeaPad A1 then you begin to realize how they are able to sell it for so cheap.

The basic specs of the two devices are very familiar for anyone researching the 7 inch budget tablet market. They both have 1024x600 resolutions and they both have 512 MB of RAM. However the Kindle Fire uses a more advanced dual core processor whereas the IdeaPad A1 has a slightly older single core processor which means that the Kindle Fire will be faster.

Another drawback for the Lenovo IdeaPad A1 is that it only comes with 2GB of storage space which in this day and age is tiny. True that the Kindle Fire only has 5GB but you get the added advantage of free storage on Amazon’s cloud.

What the IdeaPad A1 lacks in performance it does make up for in terms of features. You will get two built in cameras (0.7 and 3 megapixels), Bluetooth, 3G and even offline GPS for navigation and location based apps – this means that you don’t even have to be connected to the Internet to use a satnav system.

The operating system is a non restrictive version of Android which means that you can make full use of the Android Marketplace to install any app you want and customize your user experience in any way you want.

It’s quite hard to know what niche the IdeaPad A1 fulfils compared to the Kindle Fire. We know Amazon have built their device to be a pure media consumption tablet but the basic version of the IdeaPad A1 can’t replace your smartphone, doesn’t have the capacity to be a media consumption device and lacks the power of the Samsung Galaxy Tab Plus. However, the next model up, which currently costs $250, has 16GB of storage which makes it far more practical and is a good alternative to the Nook Tablet.

That said, if you are looking for a cheap tablet with plenty of features and that doesn’t have the restrictions of a Kindle Fire then the IdeaPad A1 might be worth a look given its cheap price point. On the other hand, if you want to watch movies, listen to music and access your media from anywhere then the Kindle Fire still wins hands down in terms of the content available, performance and price.