Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang isn’t all that pleased with the first generation of Android Honeycomb tablets.
To be sure, Motorola only managed to offload a paltry 250,00 units of its overpriced Xoom tablet (as of late April) – which is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor.
“It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise at retail problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem,” Huang told CNET.
“And [of course], it’s [also] a software richness of content problem.”
However, Huang remains optimistic about the next generation of Android tablets, telling journalists and analysts a “new wave of affordable tablets” with WiFi configurations are currently “ramping up” all over the world.
“We’re going to expect another wave of tablets that are coming out to the marketplace now, ones that are even thinner and even lighter than the best offerings from anyplace, any supplier in the world,” Huang explained during a recent earnings call transcribed by ZDNet.
“And those devices are just in the process of ramping. There’s the really exciting new build of Honeycomb 3.1 that Google just demonstrated [and] we are basically stitching that up now.”
Huang also reiterated Nvidia’s staunch support for ARM-powered chips and emphasized it was a “foregone conclusion” that RISC-based architecture would be the most important standard for future apps.
“Standardization comes from compatibility with software. And the thing to keep in mind today is that the vast majority of the software developers around the world for consumer computing are increasingly developing on ARM processors.
“If you take a look at the number of devices that are being shipped today, there are far, far, far more ARMs computers being shipped than there are x86 computers being shipped. If that attracts more software developers, then there’s more rich software being developed for ARM. And that’s how standardization happens,” he added.
