HP drops $100 quad-core Android tablet into US market
Hewlett-Packard has undercut its $150 Android Slate 7 with a $100 tablet. And it's quad-core, to boot. — $100 gets you a quad-core HP 7 Plus tablet. — Hewlett-Packard — Quad-core doesn't get much cheaper than this.
Context & Ripple Effects
HP's return to Android tablets has been a long detour: it shelved an Android slate back in 2010, flirted with webOS and Windows instead, and only re-entered with the Jelly Bean Slate line last December. By May 2013 it was aiming upmarket with the $479 SlateBook x2 detachable pitched against the iPad.
The $100 HP 7 Plus reverses that direction — a quad-core tablet priced below HP's own $150 Slate 7 from just months earlier. The launch lands on the same day HP reports lighter-than-expected quarterly results, falls on its stock, and confirms plans to cut up to 16,000 jobs while committing $1 billion to OpenStack via the new HP Helion brand, so the cheap tablet arrives amid a broader cost-and-focus retrenchment.
First-order effects
- HP's own Slate 7 is effectively cannibalized: at $100 for quad-core, the $150 dual-core Slate 7 loses its reason to exist on shelves within HP's own lineup.
Second-order effects
- Rival budget-tablet vendors are pushed into a race to the bottom on specs-per-dollar, since a major PC brand has now put a name-brand quad-core device at the $100 psychological floor.
Third-order effects
- If sub-$150 pricing holds across the industry, entry-level Android tablets become a margin-thin commodity business — which fits HP's simultaneous push into enterprise cloud (Helion/OpenStack) as the higher-margin anchor of its portfolio.
The trend: Entry-level Android tablet pricing is collapsing as established PC makers treat cheap slates as volume plays rather than profit centers.