Last updated on September 24, 2013
Leaving the Surface RT in Microsoft’s shiny new Surface 2 lineup lets Microsoft offer a product that is closer to the price range of the iPad 2 and iPad mini. It also helps the company save a bit of face after the RT’s dramatic price decline in the wake of flagging sales. What it doesn’t do, though, is enable Microsoft’s first-party tablet efforts to play in the fastest-growing segment of the tablet market, products that are small (7″) and cheap (sub-$200). Apple isn’t playing in each of those subsegments, either, but it’s closer than Microsoft in both. I’ve written before about how the breakneck price compression in the small Android tablet market has forced manufacturers such as HP and HiSense to cut prices at or shortly after introduction. The latter’s Sero 7 LT is now available for well under $100 at Walmart while the Tegra 3-equipped Sero 7 Pro has hovered close to a double-digit price tag on sale. But two announcements last week hit pause on the 7″ price avalanche.
Monster, which knows a thing or two about competing in — and even begetting — oversaturated categories, introduced its own M7 7″ tablet in eight different colors with a rounded top right corner that, in a bit of inside baseball, resembles the left half of Monster’s logo. It becomes yet another exclusive for Walmart, which has shown a voracious appetite for inexpensive 7″ Android devices. Not surprisingly, Monster really hopes to differentiate based on the quality of its audio output,. This is a proposition that, at a basic level, hasn’t enabled HP to command much of a pricing premium with its Beats-enabled tablet. Monster will follow up with a 10″ tablet.
Speaking of HP, its second Android tablet, the Slatebook X2, has been early to support NVIDIA’s Tegra 4. But it will soon see some speedy competition from a number of smaller, mostly regional, distributors selling NVIDIA’s Tegra 4-equipped 7″ Tegra Note distributed via NVIDIA’s GeForce card brand companies. The tablet supports NVIDIA’s DirectStylus technology for improving passive stylus performance but — here again — stylus support hasn’t translated into strong market performance for tablets such as the Surface Pro and Galaxy Note tablets.
The M7 has debuted at $149 while the Tegra Notes are coming in at $199 . The way things have been going, though, they may be priced considerably less before long.