NVIDIA’s Kai platform aims to bring low cost quad-core Android 4.0 tablets to market
NVIDIA wants to give all Android tablet users a way to experience the power of quad-core processing at a price almost anyone could stomach. Cost is one of the biggest hurdles makers of Android tablets have had to overcome, but devices like the Kindle Fire prove that a $199 price point is plenty accessible. While the Kindle Fire benefits from an economy of scale only a retail giant like Amazon could enjoy, NVIDIA is looking to do their part to drive down prices through the introduction of their Kai platform. Here is how NVIDIA describes it:
“Our strategy on Android is simply to enable quad-core tablets running Android Ice Cream Sandwich to be developed and brought out to market at the $199 price point, and the way we do that is a platform we’ve developed called Kai. So this uses a lot of the secret sauce that’s inside Tegra 3 to allow you to develop a tablet at a much lower cost, by using a lot of innovation that we’ve developed to reduce the power that’s used by the display and use lower cost components within the tablet.”
We’ve heard rumors of a low-cost Tegra 3 tablet being developed by ASUS and Google, we’ve seen a $250 quad-core tablet unveiled at CES as part of a partnership with NVIDIA, but the dream of low-cost quad-core processing in tablets hasn’t quite yet been realized. Driving down the cost of hardware is a surefire way to get more folks on board, and the added competition at the $199 price point could only yield good results.
[via DroidDog]