Skip to main content

Velocity Micro got Competitive & Dropped Their Tablet Prices

It’s not showing up on any retail sites yet, but Velocity Micro have responded to last month’s launch of the Kindle Fire by lowering the retail price of 1 of their 4 new tablets.

The T408, an 8″ Gingerbread tablet, is now going to sell for $200. That’s $40 less than when it launched a month ago, and it’s pretty much what I thought it should be all along. It only had a single camera, Wifi, but no Bluetooth, so i thought it was priced a little high.

That new price isn’t listed anywhere just yet, but I did confirm the detail with Velocity Micro.

This was a good move for VM, but it also is going to cause them some problems. There’s no word yet on the prices of the other 3 tablets (I asked), so it looks like the 10″ T410 is going to stay at $300, and the 2 budget tablets (PS47 and PS127) that leaked last month might stay at their current prices.

That’s going to put VM in a rather odd position, because the PS47 and PS127 are considerably cheaper hardware than the T408, and now the T408 costs the same as the PS127, which has a smaller screen, less Flash storage, and was designed to be an ereader (not a tablet). The PS47, on the other hand, has been pulled from Amazon. I wonder why.

Huh. I just now realized what Amazon did to VM. All 4 of VM’s tablets ship with the Kindle app and Amazon Appstore. They are (more or less) affiliated tablets, which means that Amazon knew how much they were going to sell for at least a couple before the tablets launched. And that means that Amazon knew full well what they were doing when they went and announced the Kindle Fire at $200.

It looks like Amazon may have cut  a business partner off at the knees. That is cold.

Similar Articles


Comments


cutterjohn October 12, 2011 um 12:14 am

No way, tablet maker no longer raping consumers as far as pricing goes? What next Cell phones being priced near their actual value?


Velocity Micro to Unveil New Cheap Android Tablets at CES (Again) – The Digital Reader January 4, 2012 um 10:07 am

[…] date. And it seems likely that they won’t be shipping with Android Market or Google apps; VM’s last several tablets shipped with the Amazon Appstore and the Kindle […]


Write a Comment