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Remember the $199 budget friendly, quad-core Tegra 3 tablet-packing (ASUS Memo anyone?) that NVIDIA announced would arrive this upcoming summer? Me neither. While the Transformer line of Tegra 3 tablets (Prime and TF300) have been grabbing the media spotlight, it’s easy to forget that a number of new NVIDIA quad-core powered chips will be hitting store shelves soon. Today, NVIDIA’s CEO, Jen-Hsung Huang, revealed details of the first cheap, but powerful tablet that will be making its way to consumers this summer.

During NVIDIA’S meeting with investors, Vice President Csonger reaffirms the notion of a $199 budget tablet by revealing their new project, the ‘Kai’. Aside from creating new hardware, Csonger points that the Kai will lead the march to Tegra 3 chip tablets and it will be easy on the wallet. The Kai may possibly set the standard for low cost Tegra 3 powered slates.  How does something powerful as NVIDIA’S newest chipset reach this incredible price?

…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….

Like the newly released Transformer TF300, there’s also the possibility of the $199 tablets sacrificing some parts in order to reach that hit the $199 mark. While TF300 is considered as a great savings compared to the Prime, it narrowly edges past the line as a premium tablet. Among many, its lowered screen resolution probably help knocked a cool $100 off in price range. Indeed most consumer are satisfied with sacrificing a bit of hardware in favor performance. Part of the success of the Amazon’s Kindle Fire lay mostly on its incredibly affordable price. Currently king of Android tablets, the budget slate has garnered over 50% of the market share among Google powered tablets. With Kai on the horizon, the onslaught of a fresh batch of tablets this summer and Amazon’s updated Kindle Fire(s), the heated competition will only work in favor of consumers.

Source: NVIDIA’s Stockholder Meeting

Via: : The Verge