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 ultra mobile PC 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 ultra mobile PC 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.

If you read the article earlier about the US$1450 MID that’s for sale in Australia, you should read this as, following our article, the price has come down some 20% since we had our moan and now sits at around US$1100. That price might still sound shocking but for me it’s in the consideration-zone because it now translates to something like $750 in the U.S. Here’s why.

The cost of electronic goods in Australia is expensive compared to the US. Less demand, less competition and higher transportation costs means that pre-tax prices are at least 10% higher. Then you have to take the goods and sales tax into account. That’s another 10% that you don’t see on prices in the U.S. I would also take into account another 10% based on this being a pre-order ‘first available’ price. Typically, retailers will try and mop-up the cream of the ‘money no object’ buyers in their first shipment. You also have to consider that this is a recommended retail price and there’s going to be some flexibility built into that price. Probably another 10%.

Taking all this into account, I estimate that the price of the 3G-enabled M528 to be about $750 in the U.S. with a street price that could quickly hit $650. You might even see some retailers taking risks at $499 with the non 3G version of the device. In Europe we can expect slightly higher prices at an extimated 700 Euro for the 3G-enabled model but its still VFM compared to 800 Euro E90’s and HTC Advantages. At 900 Euros the M528 would have been a non-starter for me but I think we’re back on track now.

What do you think though? How much would you pay in pre-tax $US for the 3G-enabled M528. Vote below.

Update. It appears that we might have stirred the sales and marketing groups into a re-think. The M528 3G pricing has dropped to 1199 AUD overnight which is a much more accpeptable pre-order, early adopter, Australian market price.

Update 2. There’s some back-pedalling going on with pricing following our story. Gigabyte say they haven’t agreed any pricing yet. Details here.

Interested in mobile Internet devices? You know, the ones aimed at the consumer with consumer features and consumer pricing? Then read on… Tegatech, a well-respected ultra mobile PC retailer in Australia has recently signed a deal with Gigabyte for the distribution of it’s UMPCs and MIDs in Australia and New Zealand and has sent out an email to it’s media contacts announcing that my favorite MID, the M528 is on their books. A quick look at their website reveals that, yes, the M528 is listed, still looking very desirable, with a nice 8GB flash drive, the 3MP auto-focus cam, an 800×480 touchscreen, 11Wh battery, built-in GPS, 3G radio and an 800Mhz Intel Atom processor. With a pocketable size, a pocketable weight and that slide out keyboard it’s a dream device for many. So what’s the cost? [After the image]

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According to an Intel document that I’ll write about when there’s a break in the news flow, there are 15 Intel MIDS at CES. Still to be ticked-off here at UMPCPortal are a device from LiteON, Wilcom, Benq (I’m surprised we haven’t seen anything on that one yet) and until a few hours ago, the Gigabyte MID.

It looks like they’ve taken the same design as Aigo and will be branding it themselves. Jenn, Pocketables, says that it’s got a different operating system to the Aigo model but it doesn’t look very Windows-like from the images she’s got.

The good news is that Gigabyte distribute outside Asia. It’s right up there at the top of my wishlist right now. I think it looks fantastic and if it delivers better processing and gpu power than the Everun at a reasonable price (i’d pay up to $800 if it came with HSDPA) then the Everun and N810 devices are going to be hit hard.

No specifications at the moment .

Source: Pocketables (more images there!)