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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

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Steko·

Summary:

"a tablet of the highest quality"

"quad-core Tegra 3 processor is out"

"target price has been lowered to $149"

It seems to me that you can have one or the other. You can make a solid $149 tablet with many compromises. Or you can make a tablet that has top (ipad) quality hardware. You can't really do both without shoveling money into the toilet.

Indeed Asus already makes a tablet with top quality hardware. It sells for $499.

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Yeah, it's funny to hear people trashing Android tablets when I'm sitting with a Transformer Prime right now. It works great, and does everything I could ask for from a tablet.

I suspect that you do need a reasonable app ecosystem to get a tablet off the ground, but that once you've got the bases covered the difference between 100k apps and 400k apps becomes largely academic. If you've got a solid browser, clients for email, Facebook, and Twitter, and a reasonable ebook, movie, music and photo apps you've covered the needs of 90% of your potential buyers. Oh and Angry Birds, of course.

Which is why I expect Apple to continue to own the top end of the tablet market but continue to lose overall marketshare to the greater diversity of increasingly acceptable Android alternatives. I particularly think that the 7" form factor is going to be more than a niche and the pain Android developers have suffered up front in coding to multiple screen sizes and form factors is going to pay off.

The "tablet of the highest quality" has been around for a while, when the quoted price was still $250. So it's possible that this status has recently been superseded by the new target price (and thus downgraded processor).

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