NVIDIA Kai: $199 Quad-Core Android Tablet

NVIDIA's Tegra mobile platform has become quite famous on the tablet market, so it is natural for the Santa Clara, California-based company to want to build on that prestige.

NVIDIA held its annual meeting with stockholders just a short time ago and, during it, it revealed a new tablet project called Kai. If one wishes to listen to the entire event, this link leads right to the recording. It isn't perfectly clear if Kai is a commercial product or just a reference design that NVIDIA's OEMs are going to base their own products on. There is also no law stating that it can't be both. Basically, Kai is NVIDIA's plan to create tablets that are better than the Amazon Kindle Fire, while costing just as much: $199 / 157 Euro.

We're pretty certain NVIDIA is thinking of the upcoming 10-inch Fire, not the 7-inch model that is about to get a price cut to $150 / 117 Euro. Either way, compared to $499 / 479 Euro, the price is a steal. “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,” VP Rob Csonger said. “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.”

Kindle Fire can already play videos and music, in addition to performing all the duties of an e-reader. To outdo it, NVIDIA and company could settle for just a performance increase, but we're pretty sure video output options will be in the bag too, HDMI especially. On a related note, we guess that Kai will also spawn a Windows 8 version whenever Microsoft's OS makes its debut.

Posted in: Preview, Tablet