If you think about the trajectory of most consumer electronics, the general goal is for prices to trend downwards as they are replaced by the latest and greatest. Take a look at the Tegra 2 crop of Android Honeycomb tablets, many of which started at $499 or higher — some of them are now half that price.
But it’s still remarkable to think that an upcoming product, for example the Asus Transformer Prime, will hit the coveted $299 mark only two quarters after its release. However that is exactly what is going to happen according to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. He chatted with a few tech journalists last week and told them that in spite of the Tegra 3 chipset’s 3x speed increase over its predecessor, it is being produced in high enough volume that there shouldn’t be an issue with prices coming down soon after launch.
If 2011 was the year of the Honeycomb tablet, 2012 should be the year of the good Ice Cream Sandwich tablet. To say that many users were underwhelmed by the Android tablet experience would be an understatement. And while that experience has dramatically improved as Honeycomb has iterated from 3.0 to 3.2, it cannot yet compete with iOS for market share. Here’s hoping the Transformer Prime and its ilk can help change that trend.
Source: Engadget
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