My daily wake-up ritual usually comprises lying with one eye open, scrolling through emails from Asia on my N82 and this morning was no different with an email direct from the marketing team at Gigabyte showing up and raising my eyebrow a little bit higher than usual. According to the email from the Gigabyte notebook and UMPC marketing group in Taiwan, there are final discussions going on worldwide but there’s no pricing structure set for the Gigabyte M528 yet. All will be revealed at Computex in a few weeks time. While it’s quite embarrassing for UMPCPortal and Tegatech, it’s potentially very good news for the MID market.
Its clear that Gigabyte have been following our story and the reader comments so we’re wondering if they’re back-pedalling due to the negative feedback. Maybe Tegatech jumped the gun. Maybe it was all a ruse to get traffic and feedback. Either way, we’re back to stage-one on the pricing and now in a good position to stear the OEM’s on pricing. What I would suggest at is that we all continue to give our feedback. Use the poll below, add your comments and if you can, blog your own opinion. Gigabyte and others in the MID sector will be watching so lets take the chance while we have it.
My direct feedback to Gigabyte and all MID manufacturers at this stage would be this:
It’s clear that you might win early sales from consumers buying MIDS at high prices, I’m one of those customers, but you need to be taking a risk on the pricing in order to kick-start this new consumer product category in a positive way. Initial media feedback hangs in the search engine results for many months so it’s critical for the mobile Internet device market that the first media reviews are positive and that customers get excited without having to think twice about pricing. Do not copy the Origami UMPC strategy of high prices and expect that growth will trickle down from high-end customers feedback because, while that might be a good long-term strategy, there are too many competing products waiting in the wings for this to work for MID’s. You are in a position to be able to steer the direction of a huge Mobile Internet market and to change the path of personal and mobile computing forever so take a chance and bring sub $500 3G-enabled highly-converged online media gadgets to the people.
Did I just say Online Media Gadget? OMG! Add it to the list 
M528 details and article links available on the M528 spec. page.
Original M528 pre-order pricing article.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Hmm, whatever they do, it needs to be quick. All reports seem to point to the fact that the Jesus Phone 2.0 will include an actual ‘Son of God’(tm) in every pack, so these things need to be really cheap, totally amazing or both.
After a few months with my iPod Touch, I’m salivating at the prospect of a similar device with 3G, GPS and (assuming they’re following the offical SDK as well) something like Orb installed on it… with that in my pocket, why would I need a MID ?
Is it possible that MID manufacturers are holding off for now, waiting for the new iPhone to drop, to see whether it’s worth trying to compete with his Steveness?
Full Disclosure: I’m somewhat of an Apple-fanboi but have a raft of sub-portable devices sat in random cupboards so consider me a very interested consumer.
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May 14th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
OMG - I like that - if the price would really be $500 with 3G it would trully be OMG.
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May 14th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Well put Steve, although I could question the statement:
“Do not copy the Origami UMPC strategy of high prices and expect that growth will trickle down from high-end customers feedback because, while that might be a good long-term strategy”
I’m not convinced that is a strategy that has worked for UMPCs!
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May 14th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
i would love to see MID’s down in the range of 100-200USD. but i voted 500…
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May 14th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
i see most people have voted $500. maybe if you made $200 , $100 and $1 options everybody would have voted $1.
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May 14th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
1$, love it
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May 14th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Seriously I would go no higher than $600, not a penny more. I would prefer the $500 but when you count the max amount then yea, $600. Anymore and I could buy a PMP that can surf the internet and still have money left over for something else, or simply pick up that Q1U-EL on Buy.com for $650.
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May 14th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Yeah, I agree with zak, if there was a $1 button, everyone would have voted $1. But I really don’t believe that these things are worth more than $500. We’ll see what the real life battery is life to make it a truly useful MID. But with a Linux operating system, you’re putting very real limits on available software for the time being, so when you look at the actual level of functionality you are getting, it’s not THAT amazing. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, I think that’s ok. But it’s a reality check on the technology.
But I laughed at all of the MID video demos that show how nicely these devices flip through your pictures or play your music. Honestly, people would buy a MID for that? No. They buy iPods for that.
Going back to what chippy and a lot of others have been saying for a long time…. what is the full internet experience (FIE) like on these devices? That’s the only real value they have and I don’t believe that this value exceeds $500.
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May 14th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I don’t think they did this as any sort of publicity stunt, or error. Just as with game retailers, they probably put up an estimated price so they could start taking pre-orders. You can’t offer customers pre-orders with no pricing information, albeit it was a very high estimate, but rather safe than sorry, am I right?
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May 15th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Gigabyte has the hottest design, the hottest processor, but am not sure about the User Interface (I like the lenovo UI more).
With a hot price gigabyte would become a hot manufacturer.
On the other hand, with a high price they will be on the same boat as origami.
Lets face it high price would make people think many times before considering.
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July 19th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
test comment.
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