NVIDIA takes the wraps off “Kai”, a quad-core reference design tablet that will cost $199

One of the reasons why Amazon’s Kindle Fire is doing so well is due to its affordable $199 price tag. This made the Kindle Fire an affordable tablet that Android users could root and ultimately flash custom ROMs onto it and do away with Amazon’s version of Android. Possibly looking to achieve the same amount of success that Amazon did with the Kindle Fire, we reported a few months back at according to NVIDIA’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, we could very well start seeing $199 quad-core Android tablets arrive in summer. If you thought that was just wishful thinking, think again as NVIDIA has unveiled the “Kai”, an Android tablet running on NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 quad-core processor that could retail for $199.

This was revealed at NVIDIA’s annual meeting of investors last week where according to the company’s VP, Rob Csonger:

“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. 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.”

Will the Kai be a reference design for other manufacturers or will NVIDIA be putting it out themselves? At this point we’re not too sure, but if the idea of a $199 NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core tablet sounds great to you, be sure to check back with us in the future as we will keep you updated on the situation! For those interested, the annual investor meeting can be listened to in its entirety on NVIDIA’s website.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Tablets
Tags: NVIDIA