The $199 price point is a barrier that is being targeted by various manufacturers, key among them being the bestselling Amazon Kindle Fire and the upcoming (if you believe the plethora of rumors) Nexus tablet that Google is making in association with ASUStek computers.
What binds all the tablets in the sub $200 price zone together though is the compulsion to skip out on high end specs.
The idea is that budget buyers are willing to skip out on Retina displays and the like found on top-end tablets such as the iPad, as long as their wallets don’t end up with a hole.
The familiar need to compromise and skimp on high end hardware at low prices may soon be a thing of the past though. Nvidia is said to be working on a $199 tablet called ‘Kai’. This isn’t just any old $199 Android tablet, mind you. At a budget price, you will get Nvidia’s very own Tegra 3 chipset for blazing fast processing as well as the Android operating system’s latest and greatest version – 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).
“Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market at the $199 price point, and the way we do that is a platform we’ve developed called Kai. So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that’s inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost, by using a lot of innovation that we’ve developed to reduce the power that’s used by the display and use lower cost components within the tablet.” – Rob Csonger, Nvidia Vice President.
It is quite apparent that Nvidia doesn’t plan to make Kai just a single piece of high-end, low cost hardware. Instead, it plans to make it a platform that will truly integrate Tegra 3′s incredible power into the Android mainstream.
Moreover, every sign indicates that Nvidia Kai will absolutely blow the likes of the Kindle Fire out of the water in terms of sheer performance. In fact, the Kai may perhaps also prove to be worthy competition to Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2 – a tablet priced at least $50 higher. It goes without saying that should Nvidia live up to its ambitious plans for the Kai, the Android tablet market will be turned on its head.
[source The Verge]
