Sony Cuts the Price of its Tablet only Three Months after Release
Sony has reduced the price of its first tablet S by $100 in the US, a move that may suggest the tech company is trying to sway consumers to its Android-based device. At the company’s online store, the 16 GB model has been reduced to $399 while the 32 GB model is now $499.
Why would Sony mark down the price of their first tablet on the market only three months after its release? The company already put the Tablet S on sale at $50 off during the holiday season. The Android Honeycomb-based device is now $100 less than the iPad.
The tablet market is a hard one everyone but Apple. Research In Motion recently reduced their BlackBerry PlayBook by about half, Hewlet-Packard made waves with its now-defunct TouchPad and many other tablet makers have either already slashed their prices, or are predicted to do so in 2012.
The iPad currently owns more than 60 percent of the market share, and while that is a significant drop from the beginning of the year, Apple’s tablet is still holding strong at the top. Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Nobel’s Nook Tablet have both helped to close the market share gap a bit, but they have offered their devices at a rumored, below-cost price that other companies can’t compete with.
The Tablet S is a worthy opponent. Its main problem is that it is not an iPad. It features a 9.4-inch touch screen display with 1280×800 resolution. It comes with a 5 megapixel back-facing camera and a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera. The processor is a dual-core Nvidia Tegra2 and the device runs on Honeycomb, although reports are saying that Sony will be updating to Ice Cream Sandwich in the near future.
[Via: PCWorld, Games Industry]