The
Spark tablet is a 7 inch tablet that will ship with Linux and the KDE Plasma Active user interface. Its expected to ship in May for about $265, and it should go up for pre-order soon.
KDE developer Aaron Seigo has posted a first video of Plasma Active running on the tablet. It seems to respond well to touch, and the animated effects look pretty smooth although there appears to be a little lag in some activities.
Under the hood, the tablet is running
Mer Linux, which is the open source continuation of MeeGo Linux. Plasma Active runs on top of that.
The Spark tablet is basically a rebranded version of the Zenithink C71 tablet which has been configured to run Mer and Plasma Active instead of Google Android.
The tablet has a 1 GHz AMLogic ARM Cortex-A9 processor, Mali 400 graphics, a 7 inch, 800 x 480 pixel display, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. It has a 1.3MP front-facing camera, 802.11b/g/ WiFi, and a microSD card slot.
Its not exactly a top-of-the-line tablet, but its one of the first to be marketed as a truly open device, with open source software, and unlocked bootloader, and even an app and content store based on an open platform anyone will be able to create their own custom content stores for the Spark tablet.