Carphone Warehouse beat Argos and Tesco with a £49 7-inch tablet

Carphone Warehouse's Avoca 7 is the latest budget offering hoping to get a slice of Christmas sales of mobile devices

In the race to the bottom for budget-priced tablet computers, the Carphone Warehouse has just undercut the competition announcing that they will be selling a 7-inch device costing just £49.

This undercuts the previous holder of the low-priced crown, Argos, whose MyTablet device was released this month for £99, a tablet that was itself undercutting Tesco’s Hudl, unveiled in September and priced at £119.

Carphone Warehouse’s Avoca 7 (it usually costs £99 and has been knocked down to £49 “while stocks last”) features a screen resolution of 800x480, 512MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor.

It runs on Android Jelly Bean (that’s version 4.2) and comes with 8GB of internal storage, expandable up to 32GB with a mIcroSD slot.

In comparison, the £99 MyTablet features the same storage, but with a 1024x600 screen resolution and a dual-core 1.6GHz processor. The Hudl offers a 1,440x990 resolution, a 1.5GHz quad-core processor and 16GB of internal memory.

Carphone Warehouse’s UK Chief Executive Graham Stapleton said: “We know that over a third of tablet purchases are for children and family use but that one of the main barriers to not buying a tablet is cost.

“Our Android 7” tablet smashes right through the previous lowest priced tablets and is perfect for families and anyone wanting a modern, portable tablet at a bargain price.”

(for more information on tablets, check out our guide to the most popular devices this Christmas)

The back of the Avoca 7 confusingly shows a sticker declaring that the tablet is '1080p' - a more impressive spec than the 800x480 resolution that Carphone Warehouse claim.