Asus and NVIDIA briefly mention $249 7-inch Tegra 3 ICS tablet
During their press conference yesterday, Asus and NVIDIA talked a lot about the Tegra 3 and how it’s awesome and all that. They rounded it off by briefly showing a 7-inch Asus tablet that is going to run Ice Cream Sandwich on Tegra 3 and cost only $249. Unfortunately, that’s where the information stream ended, and little more is known of the device. It looks to be the ASUS Eee Pad MeMO ME370T, but there’s a lot of model numbers and specs floating around right now and nothing concrete. The original MeMO was announced at last year’s CES but never made it to market. Its digitizer capabilities have been spotted in one version of the MeMO at CES which is different from the digitizer-lacking ME370T. Rumors of 8 megapixel cameras, GPS etc are floating around, but really, no one knows for sure exactly what those $249 will get you right now.
To be realistic, I doubt even Asus knows at this point. When a company pulls a seemingly underpriced tablet out of its…pants a year after the same name was used for a tablet that turned out to be vaporware, I kinda lose interest and go back to reading about devices that have names, prices, specs and release dates all set in stone. Besides, the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus that I’m carrying around these days is down to $350 in the US, so I have a feeling that by the time this $249 tablet is actually released, the combination of market/price changes and cutbacks in other areas of the tablet is going to be all the explanation we need for the low price. It’s easy to get carried away with all the tech coming out of CES, and it isn’t until you start comparing what’s on the market with what was shown off the previous year that you start realizing that it’s a long way from CES to consumer hands.
[Engadget]
