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Marvell announces $99 Moby Tablet to Revolutionize Education

Posted by Charbax – March 18, 2010 – View Comments

According to this press release, Marvell is announcing the $99 Moby Tablet for Education. You’ve seen my video of Marvell’s 4.3″ Tablet prototype shown at CES based on the Marvell Armada 600 processor. The Moby tablet is based on the same Armada 600 platform but comes with a larger screen (probably 10″).


This is an image of a 10″ Marvell powered tablet recently shown at the Future of Publishing Summit in New York City as published by Harry McCracken of Technologizer.com, which may be the first $99 Moby Tablet prototype. Consider, this prototype design is most likely of a reference design, Moby won’t look like this when shipped.

Marvell’s Moby Tablet may be the first prototype of the OLPC XO 3.0:


The OLPC XO 3.0 for $75 wasn’t supposed to happen before 2012, but Marvell may now be speeding up its release for a $99 Tablet for Education within months.

Marvell’s first version of the $99 Tablet might not initially achieve all the design goals of the One Laptop Per Child XO-3, such as making it as waterproof, sturdy and with plastic unbreakable touch screen.

Will Marvell sell it directly to Governments and Schools to keep the costs low? Or does Marvell plan to have many vendors use their Tablet platform to release several versions of this Tablet platform for around $99 using many brands?

Most importantly, will the first Moby tablets come with a 10″ Pixel Qi capacitive touch screen display? Their press release does not yet mention Pixel Qi for the screen technology. But as this is targetted for replacing school textbooks, as it’s intended for reading, as Marvell is the largest sponsor of the One Laptop Per Child program of which Pixel Qi is a spin-off company and that the press release clearly says that “The ultra low power Moby tablet is designed for long-battery life“, my expectation is that it has to come with a Pixel Qi LCD touch screen display to be readable nearly as clearly as with e-ink and to be able to provide 20-30h battery runtime or more.

Powered by high-performance, highly scalable, and low-power Marvell® ARMADA™ 600 series of application processors, the Moby tablet features gigahertz-class processor speed, 1080p full-HD encode and decode, intelligent power management, power-efficient Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM/GPS connectivity, high performance 3D graphics capability and support for multiple software standards including full Adobe Flash, Android™ and Windows Mobile.

This seems to be happening now, for release soon, yet not with a confirmed release date yet:

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.

Marvell will soon announce a pilot program in partnership with the District of Columbia Public School system (DCPS) where the Company will donate a Moby tablet to every child in an at-risk school as part of a multi-year program in new media and learning.

And this is definitely related to the One Laptop Per Child OLPC project:

Marvell has made a long-term commitment to supporting education at all levels and is the largest sponsor of the One Laptop per Child program which is bringing much-needed netbook computers to the developing world.

It would be really great of Marvell to speed up the release of the thin, light and cheap tablet/e-reader for education. Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit said following at her keynote speech to the country’s leading publishers at the Future of Publishing conference:

Education is the most pressing social and economic issue facing our country and our times. (…) Marvell can help propel education into the 21st century with an all-in-one device that gives students access to the best live content, information and resources the world has to offer — from books and online sources, in text, video, news, music, data expression or any medium. With Moby tablet, students can conduct primary research, reach out directly to the world’s leading subject experts and even collaborate with one another around the globe. Best of all, the device is highly affordable. I envision Marvell’s Moby tablets to benefit all students around the world.

I am definitely eager to see and hear more on Marvell’s Moby $99 Tablet project. Look forward to more coverage on this Tablet/e-Reader for Education here at http://ARMdevices.net as I try to get more informations and perhaps even bring you videos of more prototypes soon.

Source: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/marvell-drives-education-revolution-with-99-all-in-one-moby-tablet-designed-for-the-worlds-students-88376967.html

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  • Put some solar cells on the back and I would buy one.

  • Put some solar cells on the back and I would buy one.
  • morevisitor
    By this time your smartphone has probably made this technology obsolete.
    cool gifts
  • wow android tablet? i need one.
  • Good work. That's really a helpful innovation. I hope it would be worked well
  • Really a fantastic innovation. thanks for sharing. I wanna quote it on my blog
    http://technologiez.net
  • Praise science for technology!
  • Beats the Tablet Hands down, but wont a netbook due? (you really need a keyboard)
  • johannabartley
    Is this a similar thing as the $100 computer? There was a lot of talk about that too. And another thing, has the appearance of the iPad influence the future development of a $99 tablet? We live in a world where many people can lie about their education and others can't afford a good education although they struggle to study at home. Some kids succeed and get discovered and maybe sponsored by some business. I admit I used some fake transcripts in my admission file for a certain college. You understand why I can't add more details.
  • very innovative work Marvell, Nice affordable product :) i will have one soon
  • wizardofid
    to think the iPad BOM is over $260. But in the end, people buy products by weighing price against what they value most - usually style and usability - in this market
  • I dont see the point of tablets, especially in the case of a laptop per child. A tablet will never come close to delivering the sort of educational power that a laptop will achieve.
  • Check the Kindle, that category of e-readers sells 4-5 million units per year. It's great for reading all books of the world, and making annotations to them. Tablets are like that plus have video and web browsing.
  • javed
    will the cot of display be included? what about hard disk, optical drive, speaker, webcam, wifi?
  • Nice! Glad to see this kind of low-cost innovation.
  • It would be SO nice to avoid textbooks...especially for law students!

    http://blog.itag.com/141/moby/
  • ggoebel
    Let's clear up some of the comments attributed to the press release which actually aren't in it.

    Availability: "announcing the initiative" != happening now or for release soon
    Screen size: isn't mentioned
    PixelQi:isn't mentioned
    OLPC: is mentioned but not in a manner which links this product to it
    Supported OS: Android and Windows Mobile
    Price: "about $99" usually means >$99
  • svartalf
    I just wish they'd come up with an SoC like one of these with something a bit more FOSS-friendly on the GPU side of things. If they could get someone to open up like AMD did in this space, they'd have a runaway winner not just for the OLPC type stuff.
  • obarthelemy
    Congrats you've made Slashdot... where the consensus is: stop with the vapoware hype, and deliver something already.

    I kinda agree. There seems to be 10+ announcements per month... and barely anything ever available. No smartbooks. No smarttops... Nost ARM config end up costing more than Atom, for much less functionnality, features, and sewy: compare a guruplug display or an HP t5325, add what's required to make them usable... you end up with major ugly, more expensive than any nettop... Same with tablets: where can I buy a good one, right now ?
  • ET
    I agree that I'd love to see devices and not just announcements, but at least this annoucement has a price associated with it. I'd love a $99 device to appear on the market. That's a price point where I'm willing to overlook many limitations.
  • Over 4 billion ARM processors are sold every year. More than a billion phones are sold each year, nearly all are running on ARM processors.

    For Mobile Computing use and to replace desktop OS with embedded Linux is not a small piece of cake. Hundreds if not thousands of engineers have been working on it now for many months and years, on hardware acceleration so web browsing will feel just as smooth and fast on an ARM processor with embedded Linux as on Microsoft and Intel.

    The combination of fast enough ARM Cortex processors, and optimized Linux software from giants like Google, Adobe and others, all are coming together during these next few months to provide high resolution full laptop/desktop web browsing performance. And pricing per Internet connected device with the full web browsers is going to be fun, below $200 and even below $100 and battery runtime to be several times better than what consumers are used to with Intel.
  • huckleberry
    these will be on sale to consumers too right?
  • Probably, let's wait to hear from Marvell what their plan is for actual availability. It probably kind of depends on the timing of mass production of the Armada 600 processors and the good timing of being able to use Pixel Qi screens for it. Also, in terms of business strategy, it depends if Marvell wants to make them and sell them directly or have their partner brands take care of differentiation, branding and marketing based on a platform to reach the students and the retail market.
  • I want one, sure would beat my Ebookman EBM-911 as an ebook reader!
  • Knud
    Put some solar cells on the back and I would buy one.
  • By this time your smartphone has probably made this technology obsolete.
  • I think that a $10 A4 sized solar cell could definitely power it and charge it and could probably be attached on the back of this device.
  • I think the cost of text books would be greatly reduced if they did not have to be reprinted every year. It would also save a lot of trees. It would help students since they could carry one light weight ebook reader instead of having to haul all those heavy text books. I think the tablet could be sold for $99 if it came with an ebook subscription.
    iPad Dock
  • If you could get a very useful material for making things, merely by mixing water, a few common elements, and light it would be so much more enviro-friendly than what we use to make electronic equipment.

    Oh wait, we have such a thing...the wood from trees! As someone who has lived for over twenty years surrounded by National Forest lands, I can tell you that trees are constantly growing (creating wood) whether or not they are harvested.

    I won't characterize your cities as infestations of perverts and scumbags if you'll cease to characterize my forests as clear-cuts, populated by chainsaw hungry rednecks.

    Burley Honey Bee Bike Trailer
  • Dave
    Textbooks don't need to be reprinted every year. This is a device of the publishing companies to make the used book market irrelevant, so they get more sales.
  • If fact publishers get more money from reselling used books.
    Source: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=1712#
  • obarthelemy
    The specs look incredible for the price. Well, memory size and expansion are not listed, but still.

    I'm guessing $100 is bulk & before tax, so final price should be $150-$200... still in impulse purchase territory.
  • Kir
    This is amazing.

    Charbax, any idea about sales to the general public?
  • Let's wait and see what Marvell says about availability of the $99 Moby Tablet and how they plan to sell this.
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