Beginning on Wednesday, Oct 23, Walmart shoppers could bring in their old tablets and trade them for up to $300 voucher that they can used to buy a new tablet. The promo covers the newly launched iPad Air and iPad Mini.

The programme is an expansion of Walmart's previous smartphone trade-in promo. It covers 3,600 Walmart and Sam's Club stores across the U.S.

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Explaining the programme's wider coverage to include tablets, Walmart U.S. Executive Vice President of General Merchandise said in a statement, "Once we launched our smartphone trade-in program earlier this fall, we quickly heard from customer that they also wanted a way to trade-in and up to a newer tablet ... We listened and are happy to add tablets to our trade-in program just in time for the holidays.

The announcement is timely with the simultaneous release of new tablets this week, particularly the iPad Air and iPad Mini from Apple, the Surface 2 and , Surface Pro 2 from Microsoft and the Lumia 2520 from Nokia, all battling for a larger share of the market dominated by Samsung and Apple.

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The amount that the owner of an older-model tablet would receive would depend on several factors such as the screen's condition, if the tablet is still in a running condition and wireless carrier of the device.

An Apple iPad 4 (16GB Wi-Fi) would receive about $165 under the trade-in programme. If the trade-in value of the new tablet is lesser than that of the old tablet, the shopper would get the balance on a Walmart gift card.

The iPaid Air would be available on Friday, Nov 1, for $479, and the iPad Mini with Retina display for $399 when it becomes available. Walmart also reduced the prices of current iPad with Retina display 16GB Wi-Fi version to $449 from $499. The non-Retina iPad Mini 16 GB Wi-Fi version would cost $299 from the old price of $329 and the iPad 2 would be $399.

T-Mobile also extended its smartphone trade-in programme to tablets which comes with an offer of 200MB of free monthly data to all tablet customers.

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