Microsoft Starts its 12 Days of Deals with 7″ Tablet

Microsoft has started its traditional holiday promotion, 12 Days of Deals, with a Toshiba Encore Mini WT7-C16MS Signature Edition Tablet. Normally the tablet would sell for $119, but for the day you can purchase it for $79, and the extra goodies thrown in by the Redmond giant make this a sweet deal for anyone.

The tablet itself is not as impressive – it has a 1.33 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, 16GB SSD storage, Intel HD Graphics for video, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Li-Po battery offering up to 7.3 hours of uptime. The tablet is delivered with Windows 8.1 with Bing, and comes with a one-year Office 365 Personal edition subscription. And this is what makes the deal a much sweeter one – subscribing to Office Personal for one year would cost you at least $70. The subscription includes the latest versions of Microsoft’s Office apps – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, and comes with one terabyte of OneDrive storage (I have 30 gigabytes on OneDrive, and I haven’t used up 5% of it yet). Besides, the tablet is Microsoft’s Signature Edition, which means that it’s clean, with no trialware and no third party apps loaded on it.

Microsoft has already revealed tomorrow’s deal – an unlocked BLU Win HD White handset for $129 instead of $179. The affordable Windows smartphone has everything you might be looking for in your first smartphone – a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor running at 1.2 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, 8GB of storage space (enough for lots of photos and music, especially with the free OneDrive storage thrown into the deal for Windows Phone users), a 5″ IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, an 8 megapixel back camera with autofocus and a 2 megapixel front camera, good enough for everyday selfies and video messaging. As a comparison, the Nokia Lumia 535 has the same CPU, similar amounts of RAM, a less sensitive back camera sensor, and the same screen size for a similar price, but it’s only available in Asia at the moment. So, I think it’s safe to say that the Blu Win handset is a perfect first smartphone – especially at tomorrow’s price.

Microsoft will reveal further deals in the next 12 days, until December 19th. Stay tuned.