News Nvidia reveals Kai cut-price Tegra 3 tablet design

Nvidia is participating in a race to the bottom with Kai, a new reference design for a sub-$199 Tegra 3 tablet.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/05/24/nvidia-kai-tablet/1

 

Wow at that price it will surely heat up the tablet market once WinRT is released. Me likey!

 

Why they do this?

Because it's near impossible for any manufacturer (other than maybe Samsung) to produce a premium quality tablet and sell them at quantity and for a decent profit.

Because the average Joe on the street says... "£400! If I'm going to pay that I might as well buy an iPad... they're shiny!"

Amazon has a huge percentage of Android sales because they are selling devices built to a cost and have enough clout to not worry about making a mint from each hardware sale.

I think we'll see a glut of cheap, slightly underpowered, low-res windows tablets. People won't notice the crappy screens at first because see it in Metro mode with it's big play-school boxes and chunky fonts.

They'll be happy with their <5 hour battery life from the undersized cells installed in the unit, but they'll be able to buy a 3rd party Chinese pocket-burner spare from ebay for £8.99 with free shipping so they won't care. A handful of spare batteries and you'll even be able to spend most of a day watching flash videos.

And most importantly they'll be quad core. Which is like... twice as many as a dual core... so that's twice as good right? Okay so they'll be slowed down a bit by all the bloat ware 3rd party apps the suppliers will install to make an extra buck but users can remove those if they want to... and know how... and realise it's them slowing things down.

At the end of the day they'll be cheaper than the most expensive units, and fast enough for a bit of you-tube, web-browsing, angry birds and fruit ninja. So perfect 99% of the time.

Tablets are here to stay.

But bring on the Leap Motion. Me wants!

http://www.leapmotion.com/

 

"however, the screen will be significantly cheaper"

Tablets are made or broken by the quality of the screen in my opinion. It's so integral to the whole experience of using a tablet that putting in a low cost/low quality screen is insane.

 

"My name's Kai, and I'm here to kick @$$ and lower prices. And I'm all out of @$$' to kick."

(Honestly though, my first name is Kai, this is just uncanny.)

I may be in the market for a tablet when I return to school in the fall, if this is available by then I might just have to buy it.

 

Oh, me want toooo! for 70 dollar.thats the cost of a decent keyboard. Will the drivers be any good? The future is so exiting!

EDIT: Wieieieie

 

Aw, cute. It's got a companion core! Shades of Portal, anyone?