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Lenovo To Offer $200 Budget Tablet
First time accepted submitter khellendros1984 writes "Amazon's not the only big-name company planning on a budget-level tablet release; Lenovo recently announced their Ideapad A1 tablet as competition. It includes a 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU, along with other features more commonly seen on higher-priced tablets, such as dual cameras, bluetooth, GPS, wifi, and a MicroSD slot. Is this the start of the Android tablet price avalanche?"
That's where all the HP touchpads went.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Except it's a 7 inch tablet with a widescreen ratio screen. So when holding in portrait it looks silly, too narrow and too tall.
These compromises are why they get overlooked.
I see news articles saying "Sub $200 tablet from (Big Vendor) due soon" then it turns out to be vaporware. Sick of these companies never following through.
Here's an 8.4" tablet with a dual core ARM for under $200. Maybe it's a quality issue? I've read mixed things about cheap tablets. But still...
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In Australia we have for example the ZTE v9 7" WVGA tablet with 3G for $129. (Was $99 for a while). Easily unlocked, Android 2.2 or Cyanogen 2.3.
An 8 or 16GB micro-SD is a cheap add-on.
The Lenovo is certainly higher spec, except it seems crazy to have such a small (i.e. portable) tablet without 3G.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392422,00.asp
"Lenovo: Samsung Galaxy Tab Sales 20K, not 2 Million"
So, that is why Lenovo decided to deride Samsung...
Cheap, in many aspects.
If it can't do PDFs without reflowing then I don't see how it is worth it.
... Which were also 7". One has to wonder what kind of thinking went into this.
if the sub-par Chinese manufacturers can have functional tablets under 150 all day long and still make profit, why cant we have a 'decent' one for ~ 200? Not a 'great one', but a 'decent' one.
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If you can get a Netbook for $180, then why not a tablet for $200? There really isn't all the much to a tablet. I guess the expensive part would be the touch screen. But other than that, there isn't much difference. You might start off at a loss, but after the first million units have shipped, and production gets ramped up, they should easily be able to make them much cheaper than they are.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
> I guess it's not gonna happen.
No it isn't Android isn't 'Linux' so OEMs can load it without bringing down the wrath of Microsoft. Notice how there are zero ARM based netbooks/laptops for purchase. But they all have models ready to roll, sampling now, for the launch of Windows 8. They could have introduced a model running some version of Linux this year if for no other reason than to put moderate quantities of the hardware out into the world for wider testing. But there are zero available in the US. There are one or two that have popped up on liliputing being sold by unheard of vendors you could import if you were hellbent on it, but none have US distributors.
Zero is an important number. Had there only been one or two failures that would be the market talking. Zero means there is an unseen force at work. ARM is the buzzword, netbooks aren't as hot this year as last but still a major segment and running time, weight and cost are key specs. An arm netbook should be better on all three fronts at the only 'negative' of no Windows. Somebody should have at least tried, at least in an unfettered market.
Or finally look at the Chromebooks. Why did they have Intel Inside? Arm would have been better in every way. Except of course we would have been buying the shit out of them, ditching the Chrome silliness and installing Ubuntu like crazy. I know I WANT a light laptop that can run all fricking day.
Democrat delenda est
I am certain that people who make these things for a living have also done the same calculations, since that is.. what they do for a living.
If Apple were making a huge profit on the iPad (in the region of what pie in the sky percentages /. seems to think Apple is making per unit) then there would already be iPad-comparable tablets for much less and there simply aren't. It's certainly not because no one can see any money in making one though, since the launch of the original iPad.
I'll be buying at least one, assuming it's not a botch. To qualify as a botch, Lenovo would need to make the same mistakes as all those no-name $100 tabs: no gpu, insensitive touch, bad display, bad battery life. To win, the tablet doesn't need to even pretend to be an ipad, or for that matter a media player or have any cameras. There is a market for a highly portable (small, 8hr battery, fairly light) touchscreen connectivity (wifi) device. To the user, the most salient aspect of a tablet is the display: it needs to be nice looking (decent IPS, AMOLED), with a modern GPU (snappiness is 99% of the feel of the UI), fairly nice to hold (doesn't have to be CNC-milled spacecraft titanium).
We already have touchscreen thermostats, fridges, home alarm systems, conference-room-status displays, POS terminals. why not just use a cheap android tablet instead? Heck, why not use them for menus at (sit-down) restaurants? Or to keep customers happy when they're having their oil changed or hair cut?
Since the dominant component in all tabs is the display, that's what needs to be optimized. My guess is that integrating touch into the active matrix itself is the main win, though just integrating would eliminate a sheet of glass (material cost, assembly cost, thickness and weight). Cameras don't cost anything, nor do accelerometers, etc. All the teardowns show batteries come after the display/touch assembly, then 3g-type interfaces. (wifi and bluetooth are cheap.) And people: quit the flash-size pissing match: you don't need even 8 GB for a fully-functioning surf-pad. There's no reason for a connectivity tablet to have space for multiple movies - it doesn't have to be a PMP!
Lenovo knows these things, and is not trying to prove anything (unlike, oh, say HP).
> If Apple were making a huge profit on the iPad (in the region of what pie in the sky percentages /. seems to think Apple is making per unit)..
I don't know where you get your figures, but I get em off the financial pages every quarter when Apple releases performance numbers to the shareholders or when I had stock they mailed it out in an envelope. But I don't like to ride stocks that go on moonshots because of the tendency to crash without warning so I chickened out a hundred or so ago. Never thought it would keep going up this long. But one otherwise ordinary morning the news on Steve's healthis going to be bad and that price will cut in half. Too risky.
Apple doesn't sell any physical product they don't get at least fifty points on. And that is before Walmart/BestBuy takes their cut. So when Apple sells through their own retail channels (physical stores or the Apple Store) they really score. And we all know the rake off thirty nice thick points off the top of anything sold through the iTunes Store. Great as long as people are willing to keep paying up.
Democrat delenda est
You very well may be getting an "iPad replacement".
That is, you would be getting something that replaces an iPad rather than tries to compete directly with it. It is something that does all of the things that Apple Corporation disallows. That's a "replacement".
Arrogant fanboys think that everyone wants an Apple clone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Since the time overpriced tablets hit the stores, on-line and off, I can't keep wondering why people fee the urge, buying these overpriced gizmos. The netbook, which was on the same boat few years ago, is now, obtainable around $200 price point, which gives you at least twice the CPU power in most cases, a full keyboard, multiple expansion ports, more memory and storage space, alas, no touch screen. But knowing the price point of a touchscreen, sacrificing all other advantages of a netbook over a tablet, should be able to compensate the cost of a touchscreen addition and then some. So, why people are buying tablet at 4-500 dollars price points is beyond my understanding. It is time that some sensible company to get a clue that, the yahoos of this world got their overpriced gizmos and the rest of us will not give them any of our hard earned money for a sub-par device, just because it is the hot thing to have while sipping your coffee at Starbucks. Kudos to Amazon, Lenovo and whoever else comes up with cheap but equally powerful, if not more, tablets to the market.
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"You're believing marketing!" Marketing always mixes as many confusions as it can get away with before it breaks the law. "You actually believed that marketing statement had any correlation to policy?"
What companies are seeing is if they can pick off the "low end use case" with low end tablets, it forces bottom pressure on the market leader.
For example, Apple seems to have done a great job of keeping this out of the news, but "generic" mp3 players now hold 4 gigs - PLENTY for a random music collection. So for a guy like me who only loads his music once a month, who needs all that iTunes synch crap?
Same thing with tablets. We all know $600 is absurd. Tablets need to be $99. And soon a second generation of hardware will be there.
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It's not an "unseen force". When the CEO of ASUS makes a big deal about his linux netbooks at a trade show in the morning and makes a PUBLIC APOLOGY about them after lunch with Microsoft executives that force is pretty obvious. While we don't know the details of a deal the actions taken immediately afterwards can give us a good idea of the direction.