Nvidia to Push Tablet Prices to $199 With Kai Platform

Back in March, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told the New York Times that we could expect to see $199 Android tablets really soon. Not only that, but these cheap and cheerful devices would be based on the company's powerful quad-core Tegra 3 chipset. Huang said that with cheaper components, we could see $199 Android tablets as early as this summer. This week, Nvidia talked a little bit more about how the company plans to get prices down to that magic $200 price point.

The Verge reports that at last week's annual meeting of investors, Nvidia Vice President Rob Csonger revealed Kai, a tablet based on the Tegra 3 chip but developed at a lower cost. According to Csonger, Kai aims to offer Android 4.0 tablets that outgun the Kindle Fire in terms of power but match the Amazon device when it comes to price. 

"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," he's quoted as saying. "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."

Other than these remarks, we don't know much else about Kai. Still, if Jen-Hsun Huang is right, we don't have long to wait before we're introduced to this mystical Kai platform.

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