Riding off the success of Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said today that the company may launch a 7-inch tablet at the same price point this summer. Originally rumored to be priced at $249, the tablet will feature NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 processor and other components. A quad-core processor in a $199 tablet sounds great.
Activision Product Director Noah Heller talked with T3 a bit about their Call of Duty Elite app and its natural progression from smartphone to tablet.
“We’re working on the tablet app right now, I can’t tell you much about it but what I can tell you is that it will be a truly native, customised application for the tablet, it’s not just a simple port.”
Bringing COD Elite to the tablet has many advantages to the smartphone counterpart as it allows Activision to take advantage of the additional screen space. What additional features will be added to the tablet app remain a mystery but there’s been talks about possibly adding live Heat Maps among other things.
You guys up for another rumor? According to a source that spoke with Android and Me, the Google Nexus tablet is a “done deal” and won’t be what we were hoping for. When we first heard the possibility of ASUS manufacturing the Nexus tablet, we immediately assumed the $249 quad-core ASUS MeMo 370T would be the device. This won’t be the case according to the source, who says the MeMo 370T was scrapped after Google contracted ASUS for the Nexus tablet.
Today the International Data Corporation raised its 2012 tablet forecast to 106.1 million units, up from its previous forecast of 87.7 million units thanks to a stronger-than-expected 2011 finish. According to IDC, tablet shipments rose 155%, leading to a full-year 2011 total of 68.7 million units shipped. The IDC credits Amazon for raising consumers’ awareness of the tablet category in 2011 thanks to their popular $199 Kindle Fire.
According to some industry sources that spoke with DigiTimes, we could be seeing the mythical Google Nexus tablet as early as May. It’s reported that ASUS will be the one to manufacturer the 7″ low cost tablet after other potential partners didn’t quite make the cut. Apparently HTC and Acer were in the running, but after HTC’s unwillingness to to develop a low-price model and Acer’s lack of in-house R&D, ASUS was declared the winner. Considering ASUS’s recent dedication to Android and the tablet market, I would not be surprised at all if they end up manufacturing the Nexus tablet, in fact I expect it.
