New $150 Android 4.0 tablet could shake up market

Step aside, Kindle Fire. There’s a new affordable Android tablet that’s come to play.

You’ve probably never heard of Xtex, but if the New York-based startup plays its cards right, it could be the new household name in low-cost tablets.

The company has announced the My Tablet 7, a 7-inch tablet that plans to compete directly against Amazon’s wildly popular Kindle Fire device. And with a $150 price tag, it’s even cheaper.

And get this – not only is it $50 less than a Kindle Fire, it’s also much more feature rich. For starters, it has a 1.5 GHz processor, 16 GB of internal storage, and 1 GB of RAM. It also has all the standard hookups like an SD card slot, HDMI output, and a 2-megapixel front-facing camera.

But perhaps the most surprising feature for such a cheap tablet is that it comes with Android 4.0.3, the latest version of Google’s mobile platform, out of the box.

“The My Tablet 7-inch is just right. Not only is it about the size of a paperback book and ultra-slim to slip easily into a jacket or back pocket, but also it’s loaded with features for convenience and on-the-go connectivity,” Xtex said in a statement.

The company’s press release even included a quotation that explicity referenced the device being $50 cheaper than the Kindle Fire, so we know beyond a shadow of a doubt what the My Tablet 7’s main target is.

Obviously, the biggest problem here is the lack of brand awareness for Xtex. The device is available for order from the company’s website, but how much of a presence will it be able to attain on a national retail scale?