As promised back in January, Asus has now started shipping its 7-inch MeMO Pad to retail/e-tail outlets. Priced at US $149, the Asus MeMO Pad aims to take some of that cheap glory from the Asus-made Google Nexus 7.

In order to keep the price at US $149, Asus obviously had to make some cut-backs so the MeMO Pad ditches the Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset for VIA WM8950 chipset with a 1GHz clocked Cortex A9-based single-core CPU paired up with Mali-400 GPU and 1GB of RAM. It features a 7-inch 1024x600 TN touchscreen. On the other hand, while Nexus 7 is limited with either 16 or 32GB of internal storage, Asus MeMO Pad will have 16GB of internal storage that will be expandable by dirt cheap microSD card.

According to the specification sheet, the Asus MeMO Pad will run on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, have all the usual connectivity options and feature a 16Wh 4270mAh battery that should keep it live for up to 7 hours.

The new Asus MeMO pad should start to appear in a number of major retail/e-tail shops including Amazon, GameStop and Fry's Electronics and will be available in grey, pink and white color options.

Via Electronista.com.