It kind of feels like only yesterday that eFun was talking up its Nextbook Premium8 tablet (okay it was two weeks ago), however the company is already pitching the newest entry within the line. The Nextbook Premium9 has a nine-inch display, in line with the Southern California company’s fairly straight-forward naming convention. The slate runs a basic version of Android 2.3 (though the corporate assures us that a Honeycomb upgrade is at the way) and packs in 4GB of memory (expandable via a MicroSD slot), a built-in speaker, a two megapixel front-facing camera and, as a little bit a throwback, a mini USB port.
We had a little bit trouble at the software front — the tablet froze up on us once or twice during our hands-on trial, despite the 1GHz processor inside. The hardware itself is a little more promising, however. It’s actually a fine looking slick little tablet that has a pleasing feel in hand, thanks partly to its brushed metal rear — though the tablet does feel just a little at the thick side. The asking price for the Gingerbread slate is $299, though the corporate made some extent of letting us know that it’s going to likely be a touch cheaper when it goes on sale in November / December, running consumers in the direction of $269 — better, sure, but perhaps still not low enough to bring too many people over to the eFun way.
Zach Honig contributed to this report.
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