10″ OLED for $600? That can’t be right, can it?

Posted by | 01/27/2010 | 3 Comments

Everyone’s a twitter over the sweet Apple Tablet tweets from Jason Calcanis. Our focus, rightfully, has been on the battery life claim (need more usage data here). However, if I’m piecing this together properly, he’s saying this thing is a 10″ OLED TV for $600. That’s staggering.

To put that in perspective, Sony’s XEL-1 is an 11″ OLED TV that still retails for around $2,500 here in the States. LG just released a 15″ OLED TV in South Korea that costs just north of that. So Apple’s going to sell a mobile 10″ OLED with HDTV tuner for about a quarter of that price?

Yes, that is likely a price subsidized by the wireless carrier, but even if you tack on another $400 and assume it’s only the $799 model that has the OLED, it’s still less than half the price of the XEL-1. And that only weighs its worth as a TV. Count in everything else it could and should do and I don’t know what to compare it against.

If not for the utter implausibility that Jason would fake this whole thing (he has too much to lose), I’d call BS. I’m buying his claims now, but it’s really taxing my natural skepticism (especially that part about the solar-powered back). If not for his claim of short battery life, I’d find the whole thing too fantastic to believe, and even that claim will depend on the level of usage he was testing. I’m tempted to just discount it all until the official rollout.

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Category: Editorials

About the Author (Author Profile)

My name is Mark Sumimoto; I am Sumocat. I dabble in all areas of mobile computing, but my focus is Windows-based Tablet PCs and pen input. They’ve been part of my arsenal since 2004, and I’m proud to have pioneered the field of ink blogging, earning a spot as a Microsoft MVP for Touch and Tablets in the process. My current tools include a Fujitsu Lifebook T900, TEGA v2, and iPhone 4. Email me: sumocat [at] notebooks.com
  • Michael Venini

    I’m with you Mark. I believe it’s 100% fake. I don’t think Apple would allow somebody to release information before the event.

  • Frank

    what’s so special or why shouldn’t it be possible. If Apple really uses OLED displays then they’ve bought large quantities, making them pretty cheap. We also don’t know how good those are. The Sony etc. were rather prototypes, using the best available, and they produced only a few of them, making them much more expensive. So I don’t think that it’s impossible for Apple to use an OLED display and keep the price at $600, which is still very expensive for a device running just iPhone OS and using not expensive other parts, like processor, memory, … as real computers.

  • Bob

    Hey Sumocat, I assume you heard recently that Steve Jobs was reportedly quoted as saying something “will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.” Well, he wasn’t talking about the tablet’s capabilities. He was talking about twisting the suppliers’ arms enough to get a 10″ OLED tablet to market for only $600!

    (I’m kidding…I think.)

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