In continuation to my blog of yesterday, where I mentioned that RIM was forced to reduce price of its PlayBook tablet by 50% to clear its piled up stock plus they were also testing the market how much the customer is willing to pay here. The moment they discounted the price by half, the stock of 12000 Playbook tablets vanished from the shelves of the retailers in less than 4 days. No customer was interested to purchase PlayBook tablet at their original price of approx Rs. 29,000 and the moment it was reduced to half the price, everybody was interested despite the fact that this tablet is complete failure in international market.
Other manufacturers have taken the lesson from this experiment of RIM – how to push the sales of dormant products. Price cut seems to be the new weapon in the arsenal of tablet vendors in India battling tough competition from Apple’s iPad. Motorola has reportedly slashed the prices of its Honeycomb powered tablet Xoom in the Indian market.
Flipkart is selling the Wi-Fi 32GB version of the tablet for Rs. 26,500, against original price of Rs. 33,000, while Koovs is selling the same model for Rs. 21,500 and the Wi-Fi+3G model for Rs. 25,000 against original price of Rs. 31,000.
Xoom is powered by a 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM. It sports a 10.1-inch display with a 1280 x 800 resolution, includes a 5 megapixel rear camera and a 2 megapixel front facing camera, HDMI output with 32GB of inbuilt memory which can be expanded with microSD cards. The tablet is also set to get the Ice Cream Sandwich update.
Sony has reportedly slashed the prices of its recently launched Tablet S. Sony has cut the price of its 9.4-inch Tablet S by $100, so that it now starts at $400 for the 16 GB model, and costs $500 for the 32 GB model. However, the company has not yet announced any price cut in the Indian market, but now it is highly expected that the Tablet S will get a price cut in India also.
The tablet S has a 9.4-inch screen with 1280 x 800 screen resolution. The device has 1GB RAM and 16GB of internal storage. Its memory can be expandable up to 32GB using a micro SD card. It sports a 5 megapixel rear camera and a VGA front camera.
Besides RIM, Motorola and Sony, other vendors will follow the Price Reduction Spree. Wait and Watch! 2012 is going to be the year of tablets and the prices will come down drastically, in the days to come! Happy Reading!
