EE has announced its first own-brand tablet – Eagle, with a 4G LTE connection, available for £199 on a pay-as-you-go tariff or £49.99 on a £15 pay-monthly plan, which offers 2GB of monthly data.
Following the footsteps of EE’s budget smartphone Kestrel, EE Eagle is also developed by the Chinese manufacturer Huawei, with a design being an almost carbon copy of Huawei’s MediaPad M1.
Announcing the launch EE CEO Olaf Swantee said “With more experience of 4G than any other UK operator, we have unique insight into how the technology is changing behaviour.”
EE’s Chief Marketing Officer Pippa Dunn claims EE Eagle will be positioned as the iPad Mini rival, with a higher resolution display, more powerful processor, double the RAM and a lower price tag.
The new device sports an 8-inch 800 x 1,280 display and will be powered by 1.6GHz quad-core processor coupled with 1GB of RAM. EE Eagle will feature a 5MP rear facing camera, 16GB of on board storage, expandable up to 32GB via microSD card slot.
With CAT 4 LTE support under the hood the Eagle can take advantage of EE’s double speed 4G network, for download speeds of up to 60Mbps. EE Eagle will run Android Jelly Bean as its operating system, and is expected to go on sale on 28 May in the UK.
Alongside EE Eagle, three new 4G Wi-Fi dongles – Buzzard, Kite and the Osprey, were also revealed. The Buzzard and Osprey dongles comes with a price tag of £50 on a pay-as-you-go basis and will be available by next week, while the Kite will land in July at £70.
Will it be as good as their network? A few months ago it got up to 5 bars in my area. It failed and went back down to zero when I actually tried to make a call of course, and incoming calls go straight to answerphone (which costs me money to access). But… somehow they get away with trading and with claiming they’re the biggest network.
If their network is anything to go by, these tablets will be filled with cat turds and beetle piss. When you phone up to point this out, they’ll act surprised, talk in Indian, and hang up.
Good luck, consumers.