Remember that rumor from a few weeks back that said Samsung has begun mass producing 8 inch and 10 inch AMOLED panels? Well, according to the Korean website ETNews, Samsung is also producing 10.5 inch AMOLED panels. More importantly, the company will actually be launching a tablet that uses one of those 10.5 inch AMOLED panels at the Consumer Electronics Show next month in Las Vegas.
What exactly is known about this tablet? Nothing, other than the fact that it’s going to be really expensive. Probably even more expansive than the base price of an iPad Air. But hey, you never really know, maybe Samsung will try something crazy and sell this 10.5 inch AMOLED media device for $399 and drive the competition into the ground, but I severely doubt that. Why will it be so expensive? Because as much as you’d like to think AMOLED is a mature technology based on the fact that Samsung has been shipping AMOLED smartphones for close to half a decade, making large AMOLED panels is an entirely different thing altogether. Why do you think 55 inch 1080p AMOLED televisions cost five figures? The big question here isn’t about the hardware, but about the software. With each developer conference Google hosts, the company tries, practically begs, developers to make tablet optimized apps, but there’s still a huge gap between what’s available on the iPad and what’s available on Android. Until that gap gets closed, the only Android tablets worth buying, in my honest opinion, are those that are at least $100 cheaper than the cheapest retina iPad. Thankfully, the Nexus 7 perfectly fits that description.
