We're not sure why Hewlett-Packard went into stealth mode on this one, but in any event, the OEM has quietly made available a reasonably equipped Android tablet for a penny shy of $170. It's called the HP 8 and it enters the tablet scene with a 7.85-inch multi-touch IPS (In-Plane Switching) display with a 1024x768 resolution powered by an Allwinner A31 ARM Cortex A7 quad-core processor.

It also sports 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, microSD card slot, 802.11n Wi-Fi (Miracast compatible), 3.5mm headphone jack, built-in accelerometer and gyro sensors, stereo speakers (on the rear), 0.3-megapixel fixed-focus front-facing camera, 2-megapixel fixed focus rear-facing camera, and a 3,800 mAh battery good for up to 7 hours of run time.


On the software side, the HP 8 comes with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean out of the box (no word on whether or not HP is planning a KitKat upgrade), 25GB of free cloud storage via Box, Kingsoft Office, Skype, HP ePrint, and a few other apps, including several Google Play services.

Granted, there's not enough here to knock your socks off, but for $170, it will be interesting to see if HP can capture a chunk of the budget Android market. That said, the HP 8 is available now direct from HP.