Tablets - How low will they go

[vcoleiro1]

I was looking at some tablets on ebay the other day and was surprised at how cheap these things are getting. For eg you now can get a new 7" android 2.2 tablet with resistive screen, wifi, 800MHZ processor, camera etc etc for $70 delivered. More mainstreem is the Kindle fire or Lenovo A1 at $199 with capactive screens.


I was looking at some of the new tablets that are coming out from Samsung etc which are at the $500 and up price range, they just seem so expensive all of a sudden even with there greater features. l wander what the standard price for a 7" and 10" tablet will be in a 1-2 years. Im guessing theres going to be some serious price drops on the more mainstream tab's to compete with the growing cheaper brands.


It poses the question, how low will they go?.

 

[vic20ian]

Free inside a packet of cornflakes?


By the way, when did they stop putting toys in cereal, haven't seen any for a long time. Must be Hard Times.


It always used to be part of the incentive to eat the stuff ;-)


Kindle fire model is good (for the US) free film service that synchs itself to restart part watched movies on your tv when you get home and switch off the tablet. Seems unbeatable offer.


I was looking at the Sony tablet with built in multi device ir remote but it is 3x what kindle fire will be with only the remote as a different feature......

 

[vcoleiro1]

@vic20ian


They probably stopped putting stuff in cereal boxes because all the cereal ended up on the floor in the mad grab for the toy. Thats what happened when I was young

 

[gadgetoid]

I thought the new incentive for eating breakfast cereal was all the freakin' sugar they stuff into it these days?


Cheap tablets are not necessarily good tablets. I'll take the iPad over them any day- the third party software library being the biggest reason why.


Of course, I wouldn't mind a massive iPad price cut. Perhaps Apple's next model will be cheaper again.

 

[Hoodoo]

I hope someday this tablet madness stops and they start making UMPCs again.

 

[gadgetoid]

I hope someday this tablet madness stops and they start making UMPCs again.

I always liked clamshell pocket PCs. NEC MobilePro, PSION5, etc. I just find them strangely alluring... probably because I never owned one. But UMPCs... I never saw the appeal.

 

[Hoodoo]

Probably I've named them wrong, I actually mean that little things with hardware keyboard, capable of running normal OS. Sharp netwalker and the like.

 

[Darkknight512]

You will be smacking your head on the wall with that 800 mhz ARM11 CPU, I feel 800 Mhz CRM Cortex A8 is the minimum, any less is not very usable, any more is not really needed.


I think the Cortex A8 is 50% faster then the ARM11 core at the same clock rate.

 

[Batou456]

Around there.


The thing about tablets is that the processors don't represent a big of a part of the device's price, being around 25USD wholesale.  The price of the RAM, Flash storage, screen, battery, various sensors, antenna and various secondary components are more relevant to the overall pricing.


Based on the Chinese market stratification appears to be possible down to below 100USD.  The Arnova and normal Archos lines have stratified up from there with things like the Notion Ink Adam before you'd reach Apple's price levels.  These really haven't been able to create much in the way of market deformation, unlike Amazon's entry into the market which has the potential to wreak havoc on the existing ecosystem.

Of course, I wouldn't mind a massive iPad price cut. Perhaps Apple's next model will be cheaper again.

Since when has Apple shown any interest in being price competitive?  Their game has always been using marketing, trying to set themselves up as a premium brand, and using clout to develop and exploit underdeveloped markets while pretending they're actually introducing something novel, ala Ginsu knives.  Them moving in is a good thing if you agree with that market being moved up, but history has shown they don't and can't compete in competitive ecosystem and will instead revert to patent trolling to try to remove competitors through specious lawsuits and warped propaganda around them being a "premium" brand.


I'm still trying to figure out how their absolute kludge of a GUI gets lauded, particularly as something user friendly. The average low level user has a tendency to not comprehend that the top bar is a contextual menu bar and that closing the window on the screen doesn't actually close the program, unlike with just about every other GUI ever designed. I got plenty of questions about the stop light buttons when I recently ran a computer labs with Macs, because they're really just not as intuitive as the picturegrams everyone else uses. The Dock has some very limited strengths as an oversized quick access icon cluster but unless a user is really limited in their program usage, they're stuck going to Spotlight or Finder neither of which are intuitive enough in calling out to the average user to not require reminding them they even exist. The kludge of a taskbar analogue forced on the Dock is a less then wonderful compromise for multitasking program management, and the more advanced multitasking features basically require more RTFM time then the average low-level user tends to be interested in.


OS X's interface design is literally still stuck in the 80s, and is a reversion of NeXTSTEP.