Remember Nvidia’s Project Kai? Announced back in May, Kai was supposed to offer vendors a cheap Tegra 3 based platform for $199 tablets. Nvidia made quite a bit of noise about it and the first designs were expected to appear in the latter part of the year, which came and went.

Of course, things picked up with the Nexus 7, and we hoped it would be a template for future Kai tablets. We were wrong. Acer joined the fun with the Iconia A110, Toshiba recently introduced the Excite 10 and Fuhu also embraced Kai in three designs. But that’s about it. What’s more, some of the tablets, like the Excite 10, are nowhere near the $199 target.

For all intents and purposes, the only proper Kai tablets out there are the Nexus 7 and Iconia A110, as they really are ~$199 tablets and they are available worldwide. With Tegra 4 just around the corner, it doesn’t seem very likely that we will see more Kai tablets, unless Nvidians choose to use the same moniker for low-cost Tegra 4 designs.

We were hoping to see more low cost 7-inchers toward the end of the year, based on a range of architectures. However, apart from Amazon and Barns & Noble, tablet makers weren’t too keen to take up the challenge. Mind you, with the Nexus 7 selling for just $199, who could blame them for not even trying?