Marvell this week announced a mobile tablet based on its chips. Marvell says its Moby tablet prototype will cost $99 and feature 1080p full-HD and full Flash Internet support. The company says the Moby tablet could eliminate the need for students to buy and carry bound textbooks and an array of other tools.
Marvell says that it expects tablets based on this design to go on sale by the end of this year. It’s not talking about actual retail prices yet. Colby’s little netbook costs $85 with a 624MHz Marvell PXA303 processor & 2GB of flash storage. It runs Windows CE.
Android tablets are popping up all over and Marvel’s Armada chip is in multiple upcoming e-readers, including Plastic Logic’s Que, Spring Design’s Alex, and others.
An ARM executive predicts over 50 tablet PC devices will be launched globally by the end of the year. ARM architecture is used by chip makers Freescale, Marvell, NVIDIA, NXP (previously Philips), Qualcomm, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments and others.
Announcing the initiative this week during her keynote speech to the country’s leading publishers at the Future of Publishing conference in New York City, Marvell Co-founder Weili Dai said that the Moby tablet is a technology whose time had come. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the average cost of a single textbook for even secondary school students can range from $60 to $200. And textbook costs are going up.
