Lenovo, the tech company mainly known for its laptops, has quietly released the IdeaPad A2109 at Best Buy, aiming at the low-end price range of the tablet market. Available for $299.99 at Best Buy, the IdeaPad A2109 is just slightly more expensive than the comparable 16GB Nexus 7, one of the hottest Android devices currently on the market.

For the extra $50 over the Nexus 7's price tag, Lenovo's slate offers a bigger screen, a rear facing camera, a microSD slot, a micro-HDMI port, and a micro-USB port. The 9-inch slate packs a 1.2GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, a 1280 x 800 display, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage. The tablet comes loaded with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, with no word on whether an update to the latest Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS is in the cards.

The tablet market has surged tremendously and a slew of cheap 7-inch tablets are available, but slates with larger displays are still rare. At Best Buy, for instance, the closest competitors are a refurbished Motorola Xoom and an 8GB Acer Iconia Tab A200, both of which cost $330 and sport 10.1-inch displays. Lenovo's IdeaPad A2109 is the only quad-core tablet in its price range and the only one running Android 4.0 ICS, although its 9-inch screen is a bit smaller than the 10.1-inch displays on the other two tablets.

New activity may be happening in the bigger-screen tablet space soon, as Amazon is expected to announce a larger Kindle Fire next week. Unlike the Kindle Fire, however, the IdeaPad A2109 runs a current version of Android and provides full access to Google Play and other Google apps.

The Lenovo IdeaPad A2109 make very little noise when it was announced, but with such specs for only $299.99 it is definitely worth considering. Lenovo is also expected to unleash a 7-inch A2107 tablet soon, but the company has given no word yet on when it will be available. If Lenovo plays its cards right, it might just have a worthy challenger for Google's Nexus 7.