The Nexus tab and 370t, once rumored to be the same, or almost the same, may have hit a major fork in the road.
Rumor: Nexus tablet is a “done deal”, to retail for as low as $149 | Android and Me
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“It’s a done deal,” said the supply chain source. We have already heard countless rumors that Google was working on “a tablet of the highest quality,” and this latest report give us further confidence it’s going to happen.
What’s most surprising about the latest rumor is to hear that the target price has been lowered to $149 and that the quad-core Tegra 3 processor is out. I’m going to assume these two bits are related.
It sounds like Google wanted to undercut the Kindle Fire, so they lowered the bill of materials by going with a processor that was cheaper than Tegra 3. We heard similar stories last year that Amazon had originally chosen Tegra 2 to power the Kindle Fire, but they went with Texas Instruments’ OMAP4 at the last moment because they got a better volume deal.
ASUS has a strong relationship with Qualcomm, so we might see a Snapdragon processor end up inside this “Nexus tablet.”
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Many of our readers were excited about the ASUS MeMo 370T tablet as it stood, and I’m sure most will be upset to hear that it could be canned. Hopefully our source is wrong about that information. It could be that the MeMo 370T was slated to become the “Nexus tablet”, but Google wanted something cheaper so ASUS scrapped it and configured a lower spec’d device.
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Intriguing and scary rumors. I liked thinking they'd be the same make and possibly even use the same accessories. If Google/Asus really plans to undercut the fire, one wonders whether an sd slot is gone, the high res with better dpi is gone, the camera, hdmi etc, rather unlike the earlier rumors where you could imagine just the storage being slashed. $150 would be awesome for a lot of folks, to be sure, but that makes it harder for ASUS to sell the 370t at $250, as I'm sure they were counting on volume (among other things) to pull it off, volume that might get partially cannibalized by a super cheap Nexus tab.
Then again, don't forget Google has one advantage even the bookseller's don't have -- in addition to similar or better upsides on content sales, Google also has significant and fast growing revenue from free content advertising. Maybe they think they can shoot for $150, $175 without actually slashing down features.
It'll be interesting to see how it actually shakes out when the rumors clear, but either way, I'm more glad than ever that I didn't keep my Nook Tablet. It's going to be an interesting summer.