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Hands-on with the 7-inch XO Tablet, OLPC's first consumer device (video)
It appears the XO Touch (aka 4.0) wasn't the only new device OLPC brought to CES 2013. Interestingly, the company is moving into the consumer market this year, and it's releasing a 7-inch slate (1,024 x 600 resolution) in the US called, funnily enough, the "XO Tablet." So let's run through the specs. It's got a 1.6 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, 8 gigs of flash storage (expandable by microSD), WiFi, HDMI-out, a 3,800 mAh battery, and 2- and 1.3-megapixel shooters at the back and front, respectively. While the tablet runs stock Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, it boots into a heavily skinned, child-friendly UI with the choice of three profiles. After selecting the profile, the home screen shows the child various "dreams," which are based on professions like mathematician, astronaut, artist, chef, etc. Under these different categories, there are educational apps related to the theme of the currently selected dream. As well as what's on that main home screen, there's a stack of pre-loaded books, a curated app store and loads more to be found within the menus. What the little ones have access to is carefully chosen by the 'rents, as there as loads of parental control options, and monitoring apps which show how they use the tablets and thus, what their interests are. The child-targeted UI is extremely colorful and engaging, and is designed by Yves Béhar of OUYA fame and previous OLPC hardware. It's very slick, responsive, and full of features sure to keep kids interested. When the kids have gone to bed, however, adults can flick it back to stock Android. It looks and feels like a 7-inch tablet, so nothing much to report there, and Jelly Bean is very much a known quantity by now. It's important to note that while we did look at the finished hardware, a dead battery meant that we saw the custom UI running on a Nexus 7. To be honest, the finished hardware looked almost identical to a Nexus 7, anyway, apart from the back camera being top-center when held in landscape orientation. The tablet will be hitting US stores in March, but the only pricing info we have so far is that it'll be "competitive." We wonder what that means? Check out the gallery below for a closer look; video coming soon. Update: We've just added a video, so head on past the break to catch the OLPC XO Tablet in action. Follow all the latest CES 2013 news at our event hub.
OLPC sees bandwagon, hops on with XO tablet based on Marvell Moby design
Eh, those kiddos don't need no physical keyboards and power cranks, right? Right! In a presumed effort to both keep with the times and take advantage of what's being served to them on a silver platter, the philanthropic souls over at One Laptop Per Child have teamed with Marvell in order to develop the next OLPC -- which, predictably, will be a tablet. The forthcoming range of XO tablets will be based on Marvell's newly loosed 'Moby' reference design (which we recently toyed with), and given that purported $99 price tag, you can see why the tie-up makes sense. The slate will require but one watt of power to operate (compared to ~five watts on the existing XO laptop), and it'll include a multilingual soft keyboard with touch feedback in order to serve various regions of the globe. As for specs, we're told that the device will boast an ARMADA 610 application processor, "gigahertz processor speed," 1080p encode / decode capabilities, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio support, a GPS module and the ability to play back 3D graphics and Adobe Flash videos (zing!). There's also an integrated camera for live video conferencing, not to mention Moby's ability to support Android, Windows Mobile and / or Ubuntu. All we're told about battery life is that it's designed "expressly" to last a good, long while, and scarily enough, there's no confirmation anywhere that these will actually cost less than a Benjamin whenever they ship. Fingers crossed, though.
