What's magical about the $99 price point is that it primes it for global ubiquity.
Already Google no longer has any feature or quality disadvantages to Apple in the mobile space, either with smartphones or with tablets. Google is placed to zoom past Apple.
The $99 Tablet is an amazing price point. That competes with the One Laptop Per Child plastic thing from a few years back. Only no one will call this thing cheap. This $99 tablet will feel as sexy as any smartphone out there. It will be a phone, practically speaking. You got Wifi, you got a phone.
If you can make and receive phone calls over this, this replaces the smartphone. No? And you can. No? If it has a speaker and a microphone. If you have a Google Voice number.
Could you be able to score a $99 Google Nexus tablet for Christmas this year? ..... both new tabs would hit the market by the end of the year in an effort to defend against the anticipated iPad Mini.
His website, AnandTech.com ..... At age 30, Shimpi is courted by technology executives and followed by Wall Street analysts keen to hear his well-informed product views. He briefs Intel executives, dines with Asian PC executives and commands a loyal following of tech enthusiasts, with AnandTech.com drawing 12 million unique visitors per month. ...... His workbench at his home in Raleigh is cluttered with high-end storage drives, laptops and recently released tablets, one of them playing a Harry Potter movie in an endless loop. A storage room is filled with hundreds of other products shipped to him over the years, and he says UPS drops more gear off almost every day. ..... benchmark reviews, focusing strictly on performance data ..... Shimpi's data, painstakingly collected using proprietary tests he has developed over the years. .... "We have known Anand for a long time," Jonney Shih, chairman of the big Taiwanese computer-maker Asus .... the chips, touch screens and batteries in the latest tablets and smarpthones ...... a large, specialized audience of cutting edge techies ...... The Harry Potter movie playing over and over on a Google Nexus 7 tablet was part of a test to document its battery life. ..... carries out measurements several times for each device, with the results feeding spreadsheets with thousands of data points ..... Chip executives .. ship them samples of their new products, often ahead of their release ...... frequent travels .... standard tests established over a decade ago .... Soon after his start in high school building PCs for students and faculty at Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, where his father taught computer science, Shimpi created a website and started writing about components. He quickly gained a following with a rapidly growing niche of PC enthusiasts. .... deliberately maintains a distance between his personal life and the tech world, even if that means frequent, long flights to Silicon Valley to visit chip execs. .... He takes phone calls from investors who pay him for his advice and spends more and more time hunkered down with design engineers. But Shimpi says his main focus will remain AnandTech's readers - the sort of tech fans who spend hours reading up on new products before deciding which to buy.
Android revolutionizing the mobile space and then sturdily moving into the Netbook space is kind of like Gmail coming offline into the Outlook space. The lines are blurring. The competition is heating up.
The Netbook space is not a subset of the PC space. While the PC space seems to have stagnated, the Netbook space has seen some action. The Netbook is half way between the PC and what I call the IC, Internet Computer.
The beauty of a free, functional operating system is it brings the price down, and so you have Dell running up and down the street.
Will Microsoft counter with a stripped down version of Windows, one that might go for $10? Since we know they don't do free.
If all the operating system needs to run is a browser, how much stuff do you need, really?
On The Web
Skytone Alpha 680 Android-powered netbook spotted | Google Android... Chinese manufacturer Skytone. ...... The Alpha 680 is expected to retail for around $250 and be available sometime in Q3 2009. ....... nice to see what appears to be progress on the Android netbook front. Android Set for Netbook Leap? sees Android making the jump off of smartphones and into the netbook arena in the near future ..... Android taking between 10% and 15% of the netbook market within two years ..... Netbooks and laptops are a big growth area; they have higher growth potential than smartphones even ..... certainly within Android’s best interests to find its way onto as many devices as possible ...... In time, it will be interesting to see how many different gadgets are hosting Google's operating system Freescale Android Netbook for $199, Coming Soon? | Android Central a summer 2009 availability and a price point of around $199. ASUS coming up with a Google Android netbook? | GadgetMix.com!::.. ASUS has already allocated a team of engineers to work upon an Android-based netbook and they will able to fully develop the Android-based netbook by the end of this year. It will be interesting to see the place for such a netbook, where 90% of the netbook market is using the old and trusty Windows XP as their OS. One reason that folks at ASUS may be looking upto the Android platform is the fact that it is free. ...... there are plenty of linux custom distros which offer full firefox even in the instant-on OS. Android Netbooks Tested By Google | Android Phone Fans They were even testing out Android on a netbook… LAST YEAR! ...... back in the day somebody had almost got Android running on a mini PC - this was a year ago or more ..... I wouldn’t discount the possibility of seeing a gBook of sorts that comes with all Google products. That means based on Android, Chrome Browser, Google Gears for using Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google Reader and all down the line. ....... who wouldn’t want a super cheap netbook running Android? Dell Demonstrates Android-powered Mini 10v Netbook - Laptop News ... We've heard that many netbook manufacturers are planning to put Android on their netbooks, but Dell has gone a step further and proved that it's testing "something called Android." ..... three Mini 10vs running Dell's vanilla Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix and, most interestingly, Android's Cupcake build. ...... Who doesn't want a "very nice, little, very small and very snappy little operating environment," which "actually runs very nicely," after all?
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