I expect you've heard about as much as you can take regarding Apple's third-generation iPad over the past few weeks. It's an undeniably improved offering over the iPad 2, which itself is now a tempting buy at its new discounted price. But while the iPad is still the clear leader in the tablet space, there are some unique alternatives out there that are worth a look, particularly here in Japan.
I've previously mentioned 7-inch offerings by Panasonic and Sharp, examples of a smaller form factor that could potentially prove more popular in Japan, as they can be held with one hand on a crowded train. There's another such tablet available in Japan this month, from a company called Mobile in Style, a Japanese subsidiary of China's Kingsoft. It's called the eden Tab, and it's a relatively low-cost Android alternative that is far more portable than most of its competitors. The 7-inch device weighs a mere 330 grams, which is less than half the weight of the new third-gen iPad (662 grams).
The hardware specs are, as you might expect, modest, with 16 GB of storage (upgradable via an SD card slot), 1 GB of DDR2 RAM and a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor. It runs on the Android 2.3 operating system, although its website says that an Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) update is on the way. It has an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, as well as a 2-megapixel cam on the front.