The Tablet S from Sony’s stable has had price reductions recently, wherein the 16 GB model is now priced at $400, a $100 slash in price, while the 32 GB model has also had a $100 slash in the price and is now selling at $500. The technical specifications of the tablet however remain unchanged with the 1280×800 9.4 inch display featuring rear and front cameras, 1 GB system memory, Android Honeycomb and eight hours of rated battery life. Sony is not the first company to reduce the price of the tablets in recent times with the largest price deflation being seen in RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook. It has been selling at as much as $300 less than the actual price in recent weeks.
The Playbook, which uses the Blackberry QNX operating system and other Android systems are recently seeing a substantial decline in the initial intended price range of $700-$800 which most tablets started out with. 10 inch consumer Android tablets like the 16 GB Acer Iconia, Lenovo Ideapad K1 Tablet have been listed at $359.99 and $319.99 respectively on Best Buy in recent weeks. The 16 GB Asus Eee Pad Transformer and the 16 GB Toshiba Thrive are also both priced at $400.
The release of the Kindle Fire, though in a different segment of 7 inch tablets, is speculated to be the main reason for the large price slashes we have seen in the last few months. Amazon’s latest offering has taken the market by storm, forcing other manufacturers to reduce prices in order to even hope to complete with the Kindle Fire. Verizon seems to be the only optimistic carrier though, pricing the Motorola XyBoard between $529.99 and $729.99. The decline in the prices of tablets seems to have not affected Apple and the iPad which sold over ten million tablets in the last quarter and is still priced between $499 and $829.
