A few days ago we told you all about the ASUS Eee Pad MeMO ME370T and why it was regarded by CNET as the best tablet of CES 2012 (if you missed this post click here). The 7-inch form-factor may not suit everyone, but the $250 price tag will undoubtedly attract some attention, especially considering the Tegra 3 processor and 1GB of RAM – today we will look at whether this will perhaps have an impact on the upcoming iPad 3.
It is almost certain that Apple’s next tablet offering will not feature a display which has a diagonal any smaller than the iPad 2 (9.7 inches), so we can’t really talk about the iPad 3 and MeMO ME370T in the same light, but the fact that ASUS has announced such a powerhouse for half the price of the iPad 2 makes us wonder if Apple’s pricing strategy could need refining. Let’s face it back in 2010 when the first-gen iPad was released the tablet market wasn’t competitive, therefore Apple could set a marker for the rest of the competitors to follow, but now that people know that the MeMO ME370T is so cheap and very powerful we can see a lot of people thinking that $499 (starting price) is too much for a tablet in 2012.
The pricing is one thing Apple has to seriously consider, but what about processor speed? Well what’s certain is that consumers will want an improvement over the iPad 2, this boasts the Apple A5 processor which has two 1GHz cores – will people settle for a faster dual-core processor even though there is a $250 alternative out there which has a quad-core Tegra 3 chip? We doubt it. It’s almost certain that the iPad 3 will boast a currently unannounced Apple A6 SoC, we think this needs to be quad-core or better to stay competitive, otherwise we won’t see a quad-core iPad arrive until at least 2013.
Obviously there’s a lot more to a tablet than pricing and processor speed, in fact we shouldn’t even compare any iOS tablet to Android offerings as different software platforms run far better on certain hardware than others (Windows Phone 7 is one example of this), but with that said Apple like to wow audiences with its product reveals so the pressure is certainly on as no-matter what anyone says there were a lot of disappointed faces when Apple revealed the iPhone 4S.
What do you expect from the iPad 3 in terms of pricing and hardware?
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