According to news Australian news reports listed on the Sage blog, Gates is indicating that the price premium for the Tablet OS will be disappearing. This is great news for the Tabosphere. In a world where OEMs/ODMs and consumers count every dollar, this could give the Tablet a more even hand when competing against standard notebooks.
Next up is to work on decreasing the costs for the digitizer and enhanced displays. My guess is that this is going to be a bit trickier. I imagine there will be a price premium for the next couple years. In fact, if the trend continues for OEMs to create Tablets by adding a hinge, digitizer and Tablet OS to stock notebooks, it seems like Tablets will be premium products.
I see a couple opportunities here. One is to start adding Tablet features in some of the high-end machines. Computers with hefty graphics processing power, sleek designs, loaded with memory and huge displays. Why? Because the purchasers of these systems want the most and the best–the Tablet should be in the picture.
The other opportunity is to focus on the slate. In this case, slates offer more for less. Potentially very low end systems could be sold without keyboards and the like. But they have to be very inexpensive. Something around $900. Oh, and they’ll need some custom apps out of the box that make the user experience pleasant.
The more I’ve used the Toshiba Tablet, the more I’ve begun to hunger for a 6×9 sized slate Tablet PC as a secondary notetaking device. I’d like something ultra thin with PDA truly instant on convenience. If I’m typing, swiveling the screen around to handwrite is OK and writing on an upright screen is doable too, but I’d like something more paper like.
To me there are many Tablet possibilities still yet to emerge. I hope the coming year brings some exciting surprises.