Stefan Mileschin

Just as we were geeking out to the Jaguar 7's Ice Cream Sandwich demo and anxiously awaiting the Transformer Prime, Ingenic and MIPS completely took us by surprise by announcing the Ainol-branded NOVO7, the very first commercially available tablet with Ice Cream Sandwich officially loaded. To be specific, the device isn't brand new -- it's been previously available as a Honeycomb tablet and is now shipping with ICS pre-loaded. It's packing an Ingenic JZ4770 mobile applications processor and 1GHz MIPS-based XBurst CPU, which means this Android 4.0 slab isn't going to be the toughest workhorse in the market. What more would you expect from a $99 tablet?

The Novo7 also comes with a 7-inch capacitive touchscreen, a Vivante GC860 GPU clocked at 444MHz, 1080p video decoding, rear 2MP camera with VGA front-facing cam, USB 2.0, HDMI 1.3, microSD slot and an endorsement from Andy Rubin himself. If temptation is just too much to overcome, you can head over to the More Coverage link to order one. However, if you'd rather wait a while to save a few bucks in shipping -- it's over half the cost of the tablet itself -- MIPS informed us that it'll be coming to the States and other parts of the world over "the next several months," and 8- and 9-inch versions of the NOVO are in the works as well. Head below for a video and press release. Oh, and existing NOVO7 customers may be wondering why their tablet hasn't received ICS yet; MIPS assured us that there's an upgrade path for those customers as well, though no announcements have been made.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/05/a...id-4-0-tablet/