ITstor sells the Busbi 7 tablet for just under £50 (excluding a £10 delivery charge) but including 50 Nectar points. This tablet is the cheapest 7in model on the market with a capacitive display and Android 4.0.4 ICS.

Other features include an aluminium chassis, Wi-Fi, a microUSB port, a 2,300mAh battery, a single-core Cortex-A8 SoC (probably the AllWinner A10), 512MB of RAM, 4GB onboard storage (with a microSD card slot), a front facing camera and a screen with a 800 x 480 pixels resolution.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that it has access to Google Play and instead sports “Market Apps, SlideMe Apps and Busbi Apps”; that said, it does support Skype and BBC iPlayer apparently.

The Busbi represents a significant improvement on the first generation of Android-based tablets which were often based on the first iteration of Android. Both the hardware and the software were not ready enough for mass market and this left many early adopters frustrated.

Things have changed a lot though over the last three years with Android 4.0 becoming mainstream and the rise of many fabless Chinese semiconductor companies (Rockchip, Mediatek, AllWinner) pushing bill of material down.