Acer and Lenovo have apparently scheduled the launch of their quad-core Tegra 3 tablets for the first quarter of next year.
These devices are expected to be in the range of $460 and $600, according to Digitimes, and are intended to be direct competition for Asus's EeePad Transformer Prime. However, it won't be plain sailing for the these tablet manufacturers. Digitimes sources are concerned as to how successful the tablets can be in a market where Apple and Amazon are believed to account for the lion's share. These sources said that non-Apple tablets may only account for 10 to 15 percent of the entire tablet market.
Additionally, though the excitement surrounding quad-core tablets is palpable, it is unclear just how much value a quad-core processor has in the tablet market, where hardware horsepower isn't as important as it is in a PC. Tablets have established a perception of 'good-enough' computing and consumers tend to care little about the RAM or the actual processor in such a device if it does not offer any useful application or advantages. Manufacturers such as Samsung, Asus, Acer and Lenovo will need to overcome this by establishing an experience perception and developing a marketing strategy that describes how the quad-core processor enables experience.
Hardware alone may not help Android tablet makers much. It is probably much more important to bring the price of Tegra 3 tablets down to the $300 mark as Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently predicted.
Google really needs to make some serious improvements to Android, and while Ice Cream Sandwhich should be a good improvement it may not be enough. These tablets need to prove they aren't just boardroom toys but can also be highly productive tools that can rival the productivity of a laptop.
Until the software matures tablets will continue to be a difficult sell, no matter how many cores the processor has.
Hardware wise I think apple's products are more robust, but software wise the way Apple restricts the developers in what they are allowed to do, really ends up turning me away from their product.
When I can see what my android phone is capable of with a few additional programs, its pretty insane, full LAN support, file copying to/from servers/computers, media beaming to ANY DLNA device, I can playback any video format on my phone (mkv or otherwise).
I can't think of anything the iPhone can do that my android can't.
I'll admit the android interface is a bit rough around the edges, but it has so much more functionality.
I understand the appeal of Apple products, their interface is slick, and very user friendly, but for more advanced, computer savvy people, I firmly believe an Android device is the way to go, because the platform offers functionality that, well quite frankly Apple users probably don't / won't ever use.
My household went through about a dozen Android phones across two carriers before giving up and turning to "the dark side" over a year ago, deciding to try an iPhone. It amazes me how to this day the 3GS is faster/non-laggy than even $200 Android phones I've used, and I have yet to use an Android tablet that doesn't suffer from awful lag. My brief understanding is that the majority of the issue with this involves the custom Android OS that companies use, and that rooting (?) your phone/device and basically hacking or modding the software fixes it.
Here's hoping a quad core can make you not have to mod it?