14 DAY TRIAL // The $500 price point really doesn't look like it's going to fly any longer, not with Amazon's Kindle Fire and its $199 (146 Euro) price ravaging the appeal that standard media slates were left with.
It wasn't really possible to tell just how quickly tablets would become more affordable, but NVIDIA's CEO might just know.
Based on what a certain report attributes to NVIDIA's leader (this one to be more precise), it won't take more than six months for media slates to drop in price by a great deal.
More precisely, by the time “a couple of quarters” pass, tablets powered by the Tegra 3 SoC (system-on-chip), also known as Kal-El, will sell for $299.
That sum is about the same as 217 Euro, according to exchange rates, but European prices don't often reflect this.
It is more likely that slates in Europe will ship for 240 Euro or thereabouts.
Either way, this is a significant, to put it mildly, cut in costs, especially with the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer prime rated at $500.
For those who aren't aware, ASUS's Eee Pad Transformer Prime is the first model powered by the new Tegra chip that will be on sale.
It is already up for pre-order, in fact, and makes no secret of the high performance capabilities of the five-core (quad-core plus GPU) ARM platform.
If NVIDIA really does manage to make tablets so affordable, one could say it won't be in any danger even after x86 tablets get Windows 8 as a means to even the scales.
After all, that operating system will support ARM too, not just x86 chips from Intel or AMD.
Speaking of Advanced Micro Devices, the company might make something, Fusion-based, that could act as a viable tablet platform. Before any talk of that can start, however, it has to finish reforming (axed jobs and all).