I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am pretty interested in getting a tablet. I have a high power desktop, but I’d love to be able to kick back on my bed or downstairs and surf the net, listen to some choons and watch a bit of Friends while I’m cooking the dinner. Anyhow, as much as I like Apple products, they are expensive (iPad starts at £429), and so I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of tablets based on the Android OS. However the first mainstream one to really appear, the Samung Tab, is retailing at £600! Which to me, is insane. For that kind of money I could buy a serious PC/laptop or a 64GB iPad. I was hoping they would be ringing in at around the £200/£250 mark.
The Samsung model might not end up at that price once it appears properly, could just be a case of early price gouging... It is possible today for CCL to buy in some generic tablets to sell around the £180-200 mark from the far east so there is the potential for the price of tablets to drop massively once Acer, Asus, Dell etc all start churning out the products and a bit of competition gets going. Its far too early to dive into the tablet market in my opinion, holding off on a iPad until I see what the competition get out. The first round hasnt even started yet, just look at how good the original EEE PC was originally with Linux and what netbooks became over the course of a year. Exciting times.
True story, and I definitely won’t be jumping straight in at the beginning. However, even if the price comes down by 20% - that’s still £500! Additionally, I would rather avoid buying no name, generic tablets, because cheap, unbranded electronics are usually very unreliable. I’m just surprised that even the premium name tablets cost more than say, £350! The netbook market has totally stagnated in my opinion. There has barely been a single change in their specifications since the original release of the Atom. No wonder sales are down. It must be very frustrating for manufacturers. Hopefully they are concentrating their efforts on the development of tablets. It seems like they are taking a long, long time to come to market, and I can’t really understand why.
