Cheap Android tablets are all over the place, and generally not any good. They often have resistive touch screens instead of capacitive ones, are slow, or have no access to the Android Market. For Ice Cream Sandwich, MIPS Technologies is trotting out its existing Honeycomb tablet – which, you guessed it, uses a MIPS processor – licensed to Ainovo. For some reason, that makes this $99 tablet with capacitive screen kind of interesting.

In all honesty, I don’t believe this tablet is going to be any good – it didn’t shatter any earths in its Honeycomb incarnation either. Still we’re looking at a tablet which uses a MIPS processor, and as someone who used to spend money on ‘exotic’ non-x86 hardware, this fascinates me. As is to be expected, this MIPS processor is an SoC design, and with some interesting specifications, I must say.

“The JZ4770 SoC is powered by a MIPS32 compatible XBurst CPU designed by Ingenic,” the press release reads, “The XBurst CPU core adopts an innovative ultra-low-power pipelining architecture which consumes less than 90mW in 1GHz (with L1 cache), and the entire SOC consumes ~250mW with the CPU and video engine operating under full load. In addition to the XBurst CPU, the JZ4770 SoC integrates an optimized 1080p video processing engine, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics processing unit from Vivante Corp. and numerous on-chip analog and application blocks such as audio codecs and GPS.”

Further, we’re looking at a 7″ capacitive touch screen, and pretty decent battery life, too. It’s fully Google certified, and is actually the first Ice Cream Sandwich tablet – earlier than all the other major brands.

The tablet sells for $99, but shipping is exorbitant right now because it has to come all the way from China, but it will launch ‘natively’ in the west, too. It’s just… $99 for what is, for all intents and purposes, a MIPS machine? Awesome.

I’m sorry, but this does rekindle that old (and outdated) x86 sucks!-mentality. I want one. Just so I can say I have a MIPS machine.