Just this week TI said it foresaw phones coming down to $20 a piece without contract within the year at 3GSM.  Now Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer is saying that the company he heads will be putting smartphones out for about $100.

“We will get smartphones at consumer style prices,” Ballmer said in an interview on Tuesday at the 3GSM wireless trade show.

"I think it will take a year or two before we get to $100 type offerings (of Windows Mobile devices). I may be wrong, but not by much," he told Reuters.

With its phones currently going for two to three times that cost now, it seems hard to believe that in just a couple of years we can expect such a deal on such a smart device. Is there really truth to this claim? I mean, it was just a few years ago Microsoft promised that its regular PDA would compete with Palm’s at the $100 level and that still hasn’t happened. How’s it going to happen with a device with a little more brains in it?

Well, either way, you can expect overall pricing to decline in the next few years as more manufacturers move away from the PDA only device and focus more on the smartphone. PDAs as we know them today will end up in the bargain bin at Wal-mart soon and smartphones will be the new PDA. That we can say for sure.

[tags]smartphone,$100,cheap,steve ballmer,making promises again,3gsm[/tags]