Back in January (yes, it already seems a long time ago!) Freescale showed off a so-called ’smartbook tablet’ reference design, which it claims could ship later this year for under $200. Well, it seems more flavors could be available than we had imagined.
In a video from Armdevices.net (below), it turns out the (still unnamed) tablet is a surprisingly flexible little beast, having been optimized to play nicely with any form of Linux-based OS, including Android and Chrome OS (known in its development stage as ‘Chromium’). This is interesting stuff, because the ARM-based Freescale i.MX51 processor at the heart of the tablet is extremely cheap to produce, and has also now been tweaked to support OpenGL ES and hardware acceleration of HTML5 video playback, suggesting overall system performance could be surprisingly good.
This would provide a shot in the arm (no pun intended, maybe) for the budget sector, since it has come in for strong criticism for producing bargain bucket models in recent weeks such as the $85 Coby NBPC722 and Firstview Nike PC706V, whose components are valued at just $65. These machines pack such paltry feature sets they risk doing more harm than good to the smartbook name. After all, netbooks have had a hard enough time for their perceived lack of performance and they feature specifications many generations ahead of what is on offer here.
Freescale isn’t putting a firm release date on its tablet yet, but does hope third parties will start selling it in the latter half of the year. Now if only Google can get its Chrome OS concept UI out the door, all ARM-based tablet developers could have something really exciting to shout about…
Gordon
