Freescale Semiconductor is introducing a new reference design for a dirt cheap web tablet using an ARM Cortex A8-based processor and running Linux or Google Android. The company will be showing off a prototype at CES this week, and Freescale is looking for hardware partners to build actual products based on the reference design.
Freescale says the tablets can be built for as little as $140, allowing companies to sell the devices for up to $200 while still making a decent profit.
The ARM processor uses less than a quarter watt of power and features a total of 7 processor cores including a floating point processor for math, one for 2D graphics, another for 3D graphics, a third for 720P HD video decoding, and another for processing camera images.
Here’s what you get with the basic prototype:
•A 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel touchscreen display (single touch only)
•Less than 0.6 inches thick
•Weighs less than a pound
•12 hour battery (1900mAh)
•512MB of RAM
•Flash-based storage (4GB, 8G, or 16GB), plus an SD card slot for expansion
•Custom Linux and/or Android-based operating systems
•WiFi but and optional 3G (which would drive up the cost)
•3MP webcam
•3-axis accelerometer and ambient light sensor
Freescale says the target market for this tablet are young people between 15 and 25. These are users that are comfortable with on-screen and thumb keyboards and who don’t necessarily demand a full-sized 10-finger QWERTY keyboard which is hard to produce for devices with screens smaller than 10 inches.
Young people are also likely to balk at the idea of shelling out $60/month to connect yet another device to the internet. So rather than bundle the tablet with a 3G module and sell it through cellphone carriers, Freescale plans to make the base model a WiFi-only tablet that people can use around the house or at WiFi hotspots. In other words, you can think of this tablet as more of an oversized iPod Touch than an iPhone.
