Lenovo's wallet-friendly Android tablet has quietly gone on sale via the company's online store with pricing starting at only $199 – the same rate as Amazon's hotly-awaited Kindle Fire. The 7-inch slate carries a 1024x600 multitouch display with a 2MP camera in the front and 5MP camera in the rear, a 1GHz Texas Instruments OMAP 3622 SoC, 512MB of LPDDR2 600MHz RAM, 2GB of internal storage, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1.
While the $199 unit is only offered in black, four $249 iterations are available in black, white, pink and blue. Besides the additional color options, their storage is upgraded to a roomier 16GB of flash memory. All five versions run Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread, as opposed to 3.x Honeycomb, which was specifically designed for tablets. As noted, all units are available for purchase now, though they won't ship until roughly October 27.
Meanwhile, Toshiba's recently unveiled AT200 tablet is preparing to launch on US soil. The device is being tested by the FCC, but we haven't seen an official US release date yet. It's being manufacturered by Quanta, the same company that builds the Kindle Fire and BlackBerry PlayBook. The slate measures 7.7mm thick and carries a 10.1-inch 1280x800 display, a dual-core 1.2GHz OMAP 4430 that's quicker than Nvidia's Tegra 2, a 64GB SSD, Android 3.2, microUSB, microSD and mini-HDMI ports along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.