The $199 tablet . . . | Hacker News Reader

The $199 tablet . . .

news.cnet.com

30 pointsaresant12 comments

I think it's important to remember this is a reference design not an actual product. So when they say $199 they're presenting a low ball figure to attract companies to manufacture the actual devices. I sincerely doubt they're factoring stuff like marketing and administrative costs into that estimate.

CES is full of stories where some no-name manufacturer shows off a reference design promising the world only to have it never materialize as an actual product.

I spent a good size chunk of my young life waiting for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaze3D

Freescale would not like to burn their clients by creating impossible expectations at a consumer show.

OTOH, I've seen bigger blunders.

It should be mentioned that Freescale is not a no-name. :)

Doubtless, there will be $300 and $400 devices built upon this design, but also there will be $200 devices.

That said, the keyboard dock looks like a Speak and Spell..

I wonder if this qualifies as "looking like a toy" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1029069. This'll be sweet if true and if it hits the price points as described - I think TechCrunch was right about needing to hit the price point to get acceptance though it'll be interesting to see where Apple ends up pricing them (especially if it's true that they're targeting sales of 10M units).

Definitely not good for the JooJoo - since effectively this will probably mean they are competing against Apple's marketing/design while being squeezed out of the lower end of the market.

Add - a few more details here http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357588,00.asp

Conceptually I think that this is right on. I realized that what I want most is an adjunct to my normal computing environment such as an LCD graphics tablet for scribbling on. These tablets (say, by Wacom) are north of 1000USD, and they aren't even computers, just graphics tablets with an LCD screen. Maybe Apple will blow the status quo completely apart with their tablet, but it will have to be just mind-blowing in order to justify the Apple price. It's going to have to be more than a way to browse the net on the couch. I can do that well enough with my phone. It's going to have to change the way I think about tablet computing and maybe even touch computing altogether. In the 200USD price bracket though, all bets are off. A `good enough' way for me to hack little diagrams together makes it money well spent.

I hope this sees daylight at this price point, but I'm not going to hold my breath. On the other hand, there are ARM tablets out there already, e.g. http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ . I've been keeping an eye on them for a while, and the device seems to be pretty cool, but sadly I can't justify the cost yet. (I'm looking at it for ARM kernel development, and I can build a nice little ARM desktop for the same price, which will be easier to work with)

I have a Touchbook (I do embedded systems development for a living) and I got it to co-exist with my Beagleboard, which has really become one of my favourite computers in the house.

The Touchbook, however, still needs a lot of work .. both in the hardware design itself, and in the software - the good news is that the OS is going through many iterations and updates and is probably going to be quite slick within a few months.

That said, I look forward to the Pandora gaming console, more .. its really a much better design, in my opinion.

This device uses very similar processor cores (Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX)as the iPhone 3GS & Motorola Droid does.

Considering an iPod Touch 3rd Gen starts at ~$189.00 - The market for tablets in the $200-300 range will be hot.

Android or any other linux distro could be easily ported to the MX515 based device.

Since it's a reference design, it's not clear to me whether the $199 price tag is the BOM cost or the consumer cost. I would not be surprised if it's just BOM cost.

Make the RAM expandable and build it with a hard disk.

If it runs a Debian-like Linux (or BSD, let's not be picky) and emacs, that's more or less all I need. ;-)

3G + Flash + Android + Camera + Accelerometer

All for under $200.

I'm very excited to check this out at CES.

If this supports flash and has a nice, compliant and fast browser....sold!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com