Seems like NVIDIA wasn’t kidding when they said we’d see sub $200 tablets come summer. The company has just announced Kai, a platform of sorts that allows them to deliver powerful yet low-priced tablets to the consumer market. The price point that they’re targeting (sub $200) means that the company is dead-set on competing with Amazon’s $199 tablet, the Kindle Fire. If Kai pushes through (and we have no doubt it will) then consumers will be able to grab an powerful, quad-core powered tablet at almost half of a cost of an iPad.
VP Rob Csonger revealed Kai at the company’s annual meeting of investors last week, and said that their 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.” He added, “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.”
So how can NVIDIA possibly offer a quad-core tablet AND keep the price down? Well, the Verge is reporting that the company will be using cheaper DDR3L memory, which NVIDIA says that only they can provide. The new tablet will also feature their DirectTouch and Prism low-power display technologies. The new tablet may not be in the same league when it comes to build quality or material used (hey, you got to cut costs somewhere) when compared to bigger, pricier tablets, but we’re pretty sure that the end result will be better than the current king of the budget Android tablet, the Kindle Fire.
Source: The Verge