By Cisco’s pricing for their Cius video-conferencing and collaboration tablet has been outed by a FAQ sent to developers, and it won’t have mercy on your wallet. Expect to shell out a whopping $1000 for this thing once it sees limited availability sometime this quarter. I can’t say we’re surprised by this revelation considering who will be scooping this thing up: businesses who need more than just a phone call and email to get things done while they’re away from the office.
Everything else in the FAQ details everything we’ve heard about the tablet before so we won’t make much noise about it ourselves. One particular possibility is that Cisco might be making their mobile software solutions available to every Android phone , not just the Cius. That’s not a confirmation at all, but we’ll be excited if they bring their offerings to the market as they’re a major player in providing solutions for enterprises of all sorts. If you haven’t already caught up on what the Cius is and what it will enable you to do (and if you need to know why this will cost you twice the price of an iPad), read the full FAQ courtesy of CrunchGear.
then why announce it to us if its not a consumer device we dont care
Consumers will be able to pick it up if they so choose. And we have quite a few business users making up a chunk (albeit small) of our readership.
twice the price should mean twice as better as the iPad
Cool, it has a cheese grater too!
that thing is pretty much doomed before it even hits the store shelves… DOUBLE the price? major FAIL!
@LCW: I really doubt this will be on “store shelves”. I can’t think of any time that I’ve found high end cisco products available in consumer stores. It will most likely be available through certain distributors online or through mail order.
Cisco get ready to learn how the principle of price fixing can screw you in the end. And by the way bad design. I guess its back to R&D for you guys.
Ha-ha-ha… Did you see price for Avaya ADVD/A175 tablet? It is also Android-based but with 10″ and special “Avaya flare interface”.
Wow there are some myopic people on here. “I don’t like it so it’s a fail” sort of responses are the height of ignorance. There is a very real market for this. I know my office will be picking up many of them for a limited release. Then depending on how well it integrates into the existing Cisco environment we’ll roll it out for everyone. Get a fortune 100 company to do the same and suddenly this device will have a very real future.
Now, will I buy one for myself? No, but then there are a host of very successful products designed for industry that I don’t personally own. I’m glad to see Phandroid covering this sort of product. The acceptance of Android in business just makes it easier for individuals running Android to tie back into their work and see more products focused on securing our data. All good things.
I am especially curious to see where this goes.
the front facing camera on this tablet is 720p!
Whoa. Looks nice but I’m getting the sense that Cisco is like a major clothing label these days — they make decent enough stuff, but you’re paying mostly for the brand.
Oh, absolutely Simon. But, they can pull that price, not because their stuff is great but because they have the reputation. Sadly often in business if you buy offbrand-X and anything goes wrong, not even with that particular device but with the system it’s a part of, that device is blamed and the one who made the purchasing decision is screwed. Buy all gear with ‘THE name’ and any problems will (at least initially) fall to the implementation side of things. Fair? Right? even smart? Nope, but it’s all about CYA sadly.
Ciscos a bunch of assmonkeys.
There’s a genuine market for a proper tablet/slate. Not what the ipad is – it’s a toy. What would go down well is a front & back facing camera system that docks into a larger system, may also include a pico projector and hopefully fingerprint unlocking.
A back-of panel mousepad area would help too, with directional microphone array and excellent connectivity.
I think what we’d all like to see is a truly HD connective slate that provides seamless video calling, presentation projecting and contact-management.
Frankly i’d *love* to have a second screen on my workstation i could just lift off to take to another room to sling a presentation from my network drive onto a wall or to multiconference on video link/skype with colleagues.
Imagine vid conferencing using the projector for the other people’s visages whilst white-boarding on the slate.
And playing angry birds when that finishes for 5 minutes.
I wonder if it comes with a studio lighting rig so that the output of the camera actually looks like in the photo there.
CAn anyone explain how integrating “into the existing Cisco environment” adds value? I am not familar with how their systems work.
Cisco sells IPT phone systems. These phone systems now have newer phones that have video conferencing built into them. The cius takes it one step further, as it will run the cisco soft phone software(take your phone number with you like a cell phone, but for a desk). It then allows you to video conference right from the device. Telepresence is the new big thing in business. Face to face meetings without leaving your desk. This just adds that you can leave your desk, and be anywhere you have sufficient bandwith.
Sigh, Cisco fails yet AGAIN.
Think about this more as a handset attached to your phone at work.. and this handset is linked to your PC as well, but unlike most handsets at work you can take it throughout the building, and have access to your PC and phone.. For some at work that are “out in the field”, you can add 3G and those people will have access to their desk and phone just as if they were there.. The video conferencing thing, well that’s useful too (At least that’s what commercials and movies lead us to believe).. It’s not just a tablet.. it’s the whole integrated solution.. that’s why it’s priced higher.
I don’t know why everyone is saying this will fail.
Earth shot — those fancy Cisco phones that most large corporations have on their desk (if they’re the current models) list for around $1000. Of course nobody pays that…
This will cost slightly more, and do 10x as much, and it integrates straight into telepresence.
The dock that enables the cius to function as a phone (with a real handset) is fantastically designed.
No esthetics. What’s up with the cheese grater. So much wasted dead space around the edge. And it’s even more obvious because they two-toned it, so all that extra area is just screaming out at my eyes. Ugly. Clunky. Seriously it’s not that difficult to just copy the form factor of the ipad.
It looks cool and is a hell of lot cheaper than a Telepresence suite.
I prefer to cheer a huge company like Cisco using the Android platform for a very early version of a great future product rather than blindly bash them because they are the dominant player in their market.