But Alco Electronics, which makes inexpensive tablets under the RCA brand, isn't worried. At CES today, it showed how it's expanding its lineup of cheap tablets to include Windows laptops and 2-in-1s, and how it's bringing stock Android Marshmallow to very low price points.

"We offer a stock Android experience and have a better app store, Google Play, than Amazon does, " Alco's Mike Honeycutt said.

It can undercut Amazon on price; the company's 7-inch Voyager II tablet currently sells for $44.99 at Walmart. And they aren't running ancient versions of Android. Honeycutt showed me that the current products are on Android 5.1, while the 2016 lineup is running Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

That said, these are not fancy devices. I'm most disappointed by some of the screens, which use the older TFT LCD technology in relatively low resolutions compared to the brighter, sharper IPS LCD displays that are now more popular. Honeycutt said that for RCA's consumers, screen technology came behind processor speed, onboard storage and inputs in preferences, but showed 2016 tablets with brighter IPS screens.

The tablets have 16GB or 32GB of built-in memory and screens of middling, but appropriate resolutions: 1, 024-by-600, 1, 280-by-8, 00, or 1, 366-by-768 based on size. The new models' screens are much better than the older ones. I'm not in love with the performance of the older 1.3GHz quad-core Mediatek processors Alco is using, but the tablets are pretty cheap.

Several of the new Android tablets have their own keyboard cases. The keys on those are really small, and can be hard to use. But the keys on RCA's Windows 2-in-1s—sub-$200 Windows convertible tablet/laptops—are big and roomy, with tons of throw and clatter.

RCA showed a 12.2-inch version of its Cambio tablet, a Windows 10 device that runs on an Intel Atom Z3735 processor. The current 11.6-inch version is selling for $159 at Walmart, so this one is likely to be $199 or so, a great value for the money, even though it's slow and has only 32GB of storage.

Source: www.pcmag.com