price wars
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NVIDIA and ASUS tease 7-inch Tegra 3 tablet with ICS and $249 price tag
You know things are about to get crazy when NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and ASUS Chairman Jerry Shen are onstage at the same time. Here at NVIDIA's CES press conference, the two men just flashed a 7-inch Tegra 3 tablet with Ice Cream Sandwich. And guess what? It's going to cost $249! Got that? The same price as the much-slower, lesser-specced Nook Tablet. Given that the point of this brief tease was to prove how inexpensive tablets with current-gen innards can be, the men didn't dally with details like availability or even a product name. If these price wars continue, though, we'd almost rather ASUS take its time before sending this to market -- who knows what else we're going to see in the $250 range over the coming months? Update: It seems to be the MeMO 370T we saw earlier today, which means this slab is sporting an 8 megapixel camera, to boot. Billy Steele contributed to this report.
Breakfast Topic: AH undercutting = bargain shopping
I, Robin Torres, would like to state clearly and for the record that as a casual player, I am all for the price undercutting wars going on between the AH PvP types. What is AH PvP? It's the sub-game that is played in the auction house among players fighting to make the most money they can while trying to drive other players out of their markets. It can be vicious and lead to tons of trade chat drama, but oh, I love it so. It's not that I am all for people being mean to each other. Oh, no. I'm on record for being very much against that. But I think that players' trying to undercut each other on my local AH leads to a big win for me and my crafting alts: bargain prices. Whether it is just a casual player's using Auctioneer carelessly and selling stuff at accidentally low prices or a big war between mat vendors, if I time my purchases correctly, I win -- and honestly, so does everyone else trying to buy the affected items. This, of course, mirrors real life. When stores have price-cutting wars, observant consumers win. Duh.
Sony cuts e-reader prices: Pocket Edition now $149
Not much of a surprise here, but it looks like you can officially include Sony in the e-book reader price wars. It's now dropped the prices on its three current models: the Pocket Edition is down from $169 to $149, the Touch Edition drops from $199 to $169, and the 3G-equipped Daily Edition is now $299 (down a full $50 from $349). As The Digital Reader blog notes, however, that still leaves Sony a bit out of step with the competition -- the Pocket Edition lacks the WiFi of the similarly-priced Nook, for instance, and the Daily Edition remains a tough sell even at $299.
