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Nvidia unveils Kai tablet platform: Tegra 3 Android tablets for $199

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By Victor Hristov

Published: May 23, 2012, 4:08 AM

Nvidia unveils Kai tablet platform: Tegra 3 Android tablets for $199

The $199 tablet came to reality with the Amazon Kindle Fire. Kind of. It wasn’t a full fledged tablet, but more of a gateway to Amazon’s ecosystem. Half a year after its release, the industry is starting to finally prepare for the first tablets that will offer both a fully functional platform with no limitations and a reasonable price tag.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (7.0) already set the mark high with the latest Android ICS on board and a dual-core processor, but now Nvidia is unveiling something even better - the Kai tablet platform that will bring quad-core Tegra 3 into the $199 price zone.

Nvidia’s chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang spoke about nearly two months ago promising the first cheap Tegra 3 tablets this summer. But while we didn’t have the details then, now VP Rob Csonger lifted the cover off the idea to bring Tegra 3 to the masses:

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.

So far, this seems like a reference platform and the slide shown below clearly reminds us of the Asus ME370T, a Tegra 3 tablet carrying a $250 price tag. Will this be the first device with the new Kai platform? We can only guess until the summer. Coincidentally, that’s exactly when Google’s Nexus tablet is supposed to come out as well, so stay tuned.

source: Nvidia Annual Meeting of Stockholders via TheVerge

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Victor, a seasoned mobile technology expert, has spent over a decade at PhoneArena, exploring the depths of mobile photography and reviewing hundreds of smartphones across Android and iOS ecosystems. His passion for technology, coupled with his extensive knowledge of smartphone cameras and battery life, has positioned him as a leading voice in the mobile tech industry.

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