Nah, they sell as many IT and Arnovas as they can afford to make anyways. People still pay more for IT, but it also makes sense for Archos to try to get the Arnova as powerful and good as possible, and kind of replace 101 sales with that, partly, and then they focus on Gen9 for top Archos line, get that out as soon as they can (might be 6 months from now, I dunno).djbenson wrote:but then if they sell these much better products for the same price.. they will be cutting in their own profits because they deliver a system almost as good as the 101 tablet for 100 euros less.. you know what i'm trying to say? i'm having a double feeling about this.. and it's a little bit akward having to wait for something that might not be in stores untill the end of the year for all we know:p
Just cause the Arnova is cheaper does not necessarily mean Archos or the resellers make less money. Sometimes even if profit margins are smaller amount of money per sale, the lower cost means more sales even, and that can result in more revenues and more profits overall. That's the rule of larger volume and lower profit margins.
The big deal here is how quickly can Rockchip get this new platform out, how good can Archos get an even cheaper capacitive touch screen, how good can Rockchip make the Android support on this chip, can they get Gingerbread then Honeycomb working super smoothly on it soon, is the performance as good or better even than IT line really, does the rk29 version have HDMI output and does it really play every codec at up to 1080p 30mbitps, does it support things like Upnp streaming nicely even with enough buffer and bandwidth for up to high bitrate 1080p videos. All these questions and more, a lot of work to do there.
But surely, I think this product could be totally kick-ass at $199, super duper value. If they can make all this happen and have launched the mass production in time with large enough quantities to supply lots and lots of demand, this could be a gigantic hit. Of course one cannot expect the Arnova to have as good a screen as the $800 tablets out there, but as long as it's not worse than the IT line, then I think they will have a great success even with the most anti-Android apple fanboy reviewers, everyone will realize Android will dominate the tablet market starting this year already, faster than Nexus One made Android dominate in the smartphone industry.
