Windows 8 Bay Trail tablets may finally hit prices consumers are willing to pay

Windows 8 Bay Trail tablets may finally hit prices consumers are willing to pay

Asus is first out the door with a price tag for systems based on Intel’s Bay Trail and it looks as though the company aims to correct the catastrophic pricing decisions that helped doom both Surface and Clover Trail. According to company representatives, the Asus Transformer Book T100 convertible will ship in two flavors — a 32GB version for $350 and a 64GB version for $400. The new system uses Intel’s Z3740 Bay Trail processor. That version of the chip is limited to 1.8GHz rather than the 2.4GHz that the company has been showing at IDF, but performance will still be 2-3x better than Clover Trail, clock for clock.

The display is a 10.1-inch IPS model with a 1366×768 resolution. While that’s not as nice as Apple’s Retina Displays, it’s still 155 PPI — significantly higher than most monitors and more than acceptable on a device in this price category. The tablet has just 2GB of RAM, but that should prove more than sufficient for the form factor. Part of what’s significant about the T100 is that the $350/$400 price tag includes the dock rather than breaking it out as a $100 – $150 attachable keyboard with incredibly dubious value.

More than twice the performance at nearly half the price

Assuming other manufacturers follow Asus’ lead, we’ll finally see x86 tablets at the price points they should’ve matched twelve months ago. Microsoft’s decision to launch Surface at $500, combined with an attempt to extract far too much value from the x86 version of Windows 8, left both Windows RT and Clover Trail marooned at ridiculous price points. Surface was a $500 tablet with half the storage capacity you paid for, terrible software, andno store curation. Clover Trail devices like the Samsung Ativ started at $600, ran up to $750 with the dock, and offered miserably slow x86 performance. Ivy and Sandy Bridge-equipped notebooks with far better hardware were available for significantly less money. Toss in a great deal of unhappiness over Windows 8 design decisions and significant consumer confusion over the difference between Windows RT and standard Windows 8, and the device ecosystem sold precisely as poorly as it deserved.

Now, it’s a different story. At $400, the T100 is just over half the price of the Samsung Ativ + dock. It’s cheaper than the iPad or other 10.1-inch tablets while still including a keyboard. The 1.8GHz Bay Trail CPU is going to compete well with ARM chips, though we’re not making exact predictions until we see actual shipping hardware.

Will it be enough to ignite the Windows 8 tablet market? Probably not — at least, not all at once. Microsoft squandered every bit of consumer interest and goodwill it had built around its tablet operating system; rebuilding it is a long-term endeavor. But what this move doesdo is put lightweight systems (2.4 lbs for dock + tablet) into the hands of consumers for not much money, with significantly higher performance than you could buy in a W8 tablet 12 months ago.