Google’s delivering on its promise of keeping its interactive whiteboard under $6,000. Priced at $4,999, the Jamboard is just a hair more expensive than the 55-inch version of Cisco’s Sparkboard and considerably less so than the $8,999 Surface Hub, which was both the first of the trio to be announced and first to market when it started shipping last March.
Google’s 55-inch offering is set to arrive May. That price includes two styli and one eraser. What it doesn’t factor in, however, is upkeep. The management and support fee is going to cost your IT department an additional $600 a year – though that price will be halved if they manage to get in before the end of September. And hey, the company will throw in a free wall mount too, for good measure.
The Jamboard was a bit of a surprise announcement when the company unveiled it back in October, serving as a brand new take on enterprise hardware for Google. The play here is pretty clear, however, serving as a continued push to bring the company’s cloud-based collaboration tools into the enterprise in a big way.