When rumors about the first Honeycomb tablet, the Motorola Xoom, started hinting at a $800 price, which would’ve been like 60% more expensive than an iPad, I thought that was a huge mistake that Motorola and also Google were doing. I didn’t care how much it cost them to make it or what other features put in it to beat the iPad. The price was simply unacceptable, and I was very disappointed that they didn’t see it, too.
So even though I knew this would hurt Android terribly in short term (6 months or so) I would’ve rather had Honeycomb tablets fail then, then for them to manage to set the standard pricing for Android tablets at $800, which I think was their goal, not only of Android manufacturers, but also of the carriers, who wanted to make 3G tablets standard, so they can discount them just like phones, and people buy them with 2 year contracts.
Fortunately, if I can say that, the Motorola Xoom failed in the market, mostly because of its pricing, but also because Honeycomb wasn’t fully ready. Now a year after that, we’re seeing dual cores tablets for $200 (Kindle Fire) and even quad core Tegra 3 tablets like the new tablet Asus showed today, that will go for only $250.
That’s huge, and it’s how it should’ve played out from the beginning. Android would have a much larger market share by now. Just look at Amazon how it managed to hit around 5 million units in less than 2 months with their Kindle devices, where I’m pretty sure the vast majority of them are Kindle Fire devices.
The new tablet is also coming with Nvidia’s new DirectTouch technology, which should make touch responsiveness up to 3 times faster, thanks to the companion core of their Tegra 3 chip. Together with this new technology and with the smoothness of Android 4.0, this tablet should react ultra-fast.