Kicking off another 12 Days of Deals promotion this year, the Microsoft Store will be aggressively slashing the price of the Dell Venue 8 Pro on Monday from $299 to just $99. Likely attempting to extend the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holidays further into December, all 77 Microsoft Storesaround the country will offer the promotional price to the first twenty people in line for the Dell Venue 8 Pro tablets at 10 a.m. After the initial stock sells out, the tablet price will increase to $199 for the rest of the day while supplies last. The online version of the Microsoft Store will also offer the $99 deal to the first 100 people that start shopping at 10 a.m. ET on the site. Similar to the in-store promotion, the price will rise to $199 after the initial allotment of 100 tablets is sold. It’s possible that customers could have more luck obtaining the tablet at the brick and mortar locations as Microsoft relies on email advertising heavily over traditional fliers.
The Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet comes with an 8-inch touchscreen (1,280-by-800 resolution), 32GB of storage on a SSD drive, the Intel Atom Z3740D quad-core processor (1.8GHz), 2GB of RAM and the full Windows 8.1 operating system. It also comes with card-reader support for MicroSD, SDHC and SDXC to expand the on-board storage space and a pre-loaded version of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2013. However, it does not come with a keyboard dock, something that’s included on a similar Windows 8.1 tablet around the same price point, the ASUS T100. Regarding the remainder of the 12 Days of Deals sale, Microsoft didn’t indicate if other sales would be as aggressive as the discount on the Dell Venue 8 Pro. However, Microsoft did mention other product categories offered in the promotions will include computers and smartphones as well as accessories related to fitness, music, Windows and Xbox. The entire calendar of the sale can be viewed here.