There is a new trend in the tablet market, and it is a trend that we are very excited about. There has been a trend of low price tablets coming to the market, and HP’s TouchPad is to thank for it. Fusion Garage is the latest company to follow suit by chopping $200 off the price of its still unreleased tablet the Grid 10. The new price on Fusion Garage’s website has the new base price as a reasonable $299.
When the Grid 10 was announced in a faux press conference, it was announced at an industry standard $499 for a 10-inch tablet. With the good news of the price drop there is of course bad news, the release date has been pushed back from September 16 to October 1. If you purchased Fusion Garage’s original tablet the Joo Joo you will get a Grid 10 for free, so the price drop doesn’t really effect you.
The size and price of the Grid 10 were really the only two similar characteristics with other tablets on the market. Fusion Garage created a new operating system called Grid, which was built from the Android kernel. Technically the Grid 10 is not called an Android tablet, even though it can run Android apps. As the name implies the Grid OS uses a huge grid as the main user interface. You us the grid to organize your applications and folders, and it appears to be a very intuitive system.
As stated earlier we can thank HP for slashing the price of the HP TouchPad to $99, and selling out in less than a day. This business model proved that people are willing to buy a tablet without an Apple logo, if the price is right. Prior to the TouchPad the majority of tablets on the market were content with matching the iPhone $499 price tag. We have recently heard about Amazon’s 7-inch Amazon tablet coming out will be half the price of the iPad, and hopefully we will see more tablets follow suit.
Will this price cut cause more people to buy the Grid 10, or is it just too new and unproven to gain traction no matter the price point?
