Thus far, almost all Honeycomb tablets shipped with Nvidia’s Tegra 2 hardware. There are also some Gingerbread smartphones that shipped with it too. While the Gingerbread smartphones powered by Tegra 2 received good response, the same could not be said with the Honeycomb tablets, which most, if not all, runs on Nvidia. And that made Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia disappointed. Well, the sales of these tablets affect directly the profit of Nvidia so we can see why.

Mr Jen-Hsun Huang says that the relative paucity of tablet-optimized Android apps is the weakness, while also expressing the belief that cheaper WiFi-only models should’ve been the standard shipping config rather than fully fledged 3G / 4G variants as Motorola has been pushing with the Xoom. We can see how Motorola Xoom didn’t perform nicely when Maxis is selling it at RM 2,499 while the cheapest Apple iPad 2 can be had for only RM 1,499, even the Queen approves it.

Oddly though, Mr Huang mentioned that all these major downsides have already been “largely addressed” by “a new wave” of Android tablets. He doesn’t specify the devices that constitute said wave, but his emphasis on thinness and lightness leads us to believe he’s talking up Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 models. Weird, we didn’t see any lately, and I doubt will be priced competitively with the iPad 2.

SOURCE via CNET