Waiting for an Eee Pad Transformer Price Cut? Don't Hold Your Breath

Posted 10/05/2011 at 8:42am | by Paul Lilly

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Amazon set the tablet world ablaze by pricing its Kindle Fire at just $199, and it took all of two nanoseconds for Research In Motion to react by making sure its sales partners marked its BlackBerry PlayBook down. The pressure is on for competing tablet makers to slash prices or risk losing ground to Amazon. Will Asus be next? Don't hold your breath.

Asus CEO Jerry Shen said that, despite speculation to the contrary, his company has no plans to reduce the price of its Eee Pad Transformer device, DigiTimes reports. In fact, Asus is planning a second generation Transformer, one that will debut at $499 instead of $399 like the original.

That might be a tough sell considering the Kindle Fire costs less than half that much, but it's also a smaller tablet. Asus maintains it will ship up to 2 million tablets by the end of the year, regardless of well the Kindle Fire is selling. That's not an unreasonable estimate when you consider Asus still has the pricing advantage in the full-size (10-inch) tablet market, but for how long? There's already talk that Amazon will launch a bigger version of the Kindle Fire -- Kindle Flame, perhaps? -- and if it adopts the same aggressive pricing strategy, Asus and every other 10-inch tablet maker will start to feel the heat.

Image Credit: Asus