Freescale Debuts Designs for $199 Tablet

January 4, 2010 By Dena Cassella

Freescale will be presenting designs for its $199 smartbook tablet at CES this week.

Do we see a cheap tablet on the horizon? Of course—it’s 2010 now. Freescale Semiconductor announced it will unveil the designs on its new “smartbook” tablet computer at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week. The company says this new device will be priced at $199 and hopefully entice consumers with the notion of an affordable tablet. The Freescale tablet includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth wireless connectivity, and also features a 3D desktop framework with touch screen/QWERTY keyboard support. And, Freescale says this petite tablet will also boast its power-efficient ARM processor: the i.MX515 chip based on ARM Cortex-A8 technology.

“Freescale’s new tablet opens the door to an exciting new world of compelling form factors specifically designed and optimized to support common online activities including social media, high-quality audio/video playback and light gaming,” said Henri Richard, senior vice president of Sales and Marketing for Freescale. “We believe the tablet will emerge as a popular form factor for the next generation of smartbooks. By introducing this prototype reference design, Freescale intends to play a vital role in propelling the mainstream adoption of smartbooks.”

According to a statement, the smartbook reference design is expected to be available for evaluation beginning February 2010 through local Freescale sales representatives.

Here are some quick specs on the Freescale reference design:

Display: 7-inch (1024 x 600) touch screen
Processor: Freescale i.MX515 processor based on ARM Cortex-A8 core
Connectivity: 3G modem (option) 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS
Memory: 512 MB DDR2
Storage: from 4GB to 64GB internal storage; removable micro SD
Camera: 3 Mpixel (video recording up to VGA 30fps)
Sensors: 3-axis accelerometer and an ambient light sensor
Adobe Flash Player support
Operating system: Android or Linux
Price: under $200

Showing 3 comments

Anoyaro at 2:39pm 14th February 2010 Looks great. I would like to see this and maybe get it. I cannot afford a new iPad. This has both the tablet portion I want and the keyboard. I sure would like to know when this will be released.
bcs at 3:24pm 14th January 2010 The best application I could see would be mini-kiosks mainly for businesses or as a household appliance. This could enable easy access to common daily tasks such as calendars, appointments and alerts. This would be a niche that these tablets could fill and the best ones would be those that can be controlled and mounted easily with instant connectivity. However, this market may not be fully ready right now as they are attempting to capitalize on the smart-phone/gadget market since it is more well established.
Stu at 10:30am 4th January 2010 So it can do some of the things a smartphone can do but takes up 5X the space. I don't really get the appeal of tablets. They have been around for a long time but haven't caught on because they are too big to carry around with you, and too underpowered to do anything more than basic tasks. It's like they took a smartphone and bricked it out so you can no longer fit it in your pocket. And got rid of the phone part. So I guess it's more like an iPod touch that's too big to be convenient. At least this model has a good low price going for it. I have no idea what Apple will need to add to theirs to be able to sell it in the price range that's been discussed.