If you’re in the market for a new small tablet but on a budget, you’ll soon have two more options: the new 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Lite, and HP’s first “voice tablets” in both 6- and 7-inch sizes, the HP Slate 6 “phablet” tablet-phone and the Slate 7 VoiceTab.

HP’s Slate 6 and 7: phone or tablet?

HP’s smallest Slate tablets are its first devices with built-in cellular voice support since the company released its last iPaq phone in 2009, and then sold its Palm WebOS boondoggle before an HP WebOS phone ever saw the light of day. Although the Slate 6 and 7 are “slated” (sorry) to debut in India next month, HP reps have said that they will most likely hit other countries as well.

If you’re looking for a phone that doubles as a tiny tablet, the HP Slate 6 may be the right fit for your big pockets, but if you prefer a tablet that can occasionally be used as a phone, you might go for the slightly larger Slate 7.  The 9mm-thin Slate 6 phablet comes with a a 1280 x 720 IPS display, while the 9.5mm-thin 7-inch Slate comes with a 7-inch 1280 x 800 IPS display.  Both the 6-inch and 7-inch VoiceTabs come with built-in 3G cellular support where available on your cellular plan.

Both the Slate 6 and 7 VoiceTabs pack a quad-core processor–and though HP hasn’t revealed the supplier–it would likely be either MediaTek, Nvidia, or Qualcomm.  Both tablets come with 16 gigabytes of storage, and support for MicroSD cards of up to 32GB for additional storage.  Both sport a 5-megapixel camera on the back, 2-megapixel snapper on the front, and front-facing stereo speakers.  Unfortunately, both also come with the older Android 4.2 “Jelly Bean” on board, so we can only hope that HP will eventually issue an update to the new Android 4.4 KitKat.

If you’re in India, look for the HP Slate 6 and Slate 7 VoiceTab in February.  If you’re not in India, you’ll have to wait a bit longer, and we’ll keep you posted on where else these will show up. Although HP hasn’t revealed a price, we expect the Slate 6 to come in at $200 or less with a carrier contract, and the Slate 7 to be priced just a bit higher.

Galaxy Tab 3 Lite: light on specs, but not price

In its latest 7-inch tablet, Samsung has included a decent 1.2 GHz dual-core processor in a thin form factor (it’s only 10mm thick), but the rest of the specs are still low-end: 1 GB of RAM, 8GB of on-board storage, a 1024 x 600 resolution display, and 2-megapixel camera on back.

While that’s on par for a budget tablet, this model also lacks the latest Android candy–like the HP Slates, it ships with Jelly Bean–but hopefully Samsung will update it to KitKat.  With a 3,600 mAh capacity, the Tab 3 Lite has a promised battery life of 8 hours or more, even when watching videos.  Samsung says it will release a Wi-Fi version and a model with optional 2G and 3G cellular data.

Although you probably won’t be using this tablet’s the meager 2 megapixel camera, there are some handy features if you do: Samsung’s ‘Smile Shot’ tells the camera to automatically shoot when a smile is detected, Panorama Shot lets you take wide-angle photos, and ‘Shoot & Share’ lets you share images right after you take them.

Although Samsung hasn’t confirmed a price, the Tab 3 Lite will have to be $159 or less if it expects to move off of store shelves.  The Galaxy Tab3 Lite will be available in white and black, worldwide starting sometime in February.