Over in Las Vegas at CES we thought that ZTE might have shuffled off the shackles of its "budget brand" tag by showing off the Tegra 3 packing ZTE T98.

But a couple of new 7-inch efforts from the Chinese company have indicated that it still has eyes for the lower end of the market: the ZTE V9A Light Tab 2 and the ZTE Optik.

Starting with the former and this is a 7-inch Android tablet that e-retailer Clove has listed for a UK release in February, priced up at £234.99.

Sadly, when we say Android we mean Gingerbread and no mention of an upgrade path. However, what it does have is a 7-inch, 1024x600, capacitive display, a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 4GB of on board storage which is, of course, expandable with microSD.

There's a front facing 0.3-megapixel camera for video calling and a 3.2-megapixel one on the back. Connectivity is Wi-Fi, 3G and GPS and there's a pretty hefty 3400mAh battery on board too.

If the lack of Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich action bothers you then take comfort that the ZTE Optik, a 7-incher hitting Sprint in the States to begin with, is packing Android 3.2.

It has a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 16GB of internal memory and 1GB of RAM. Its battery is also on the large side at 4000mAh. It's going to be $99 on contract - no word on a UK release as of yet.

We're told by industry sources to expect some big announcements from ZTE over in Barcelona next month. We're just hoping this means more higher end devices, rather than a saturation at the bottom table.