200 DollarTablet Launched

Finally we have launched this blog for our 200 dollar tablet project. We know that it is not a sound name but it is straightly self-explained. Yes, 200 dollar tablet! We really can't afford the high price of a MIDLET device which has most of things we don't want. So we decide to make our own. And not only we, as a small group of people, do deadly want this product, we believe the concept in it has the potential to 'kill' any existing PDA in the market. And what is the concept? Hey, it is so called 'Cloud Computing'. We want to put all your apps running far from your device and the only thing executed is the web browser. You email, calendar, and photos etc can all be managed by web applications. Even media application like music and video are also dominated by flash player like Youtube.

After the concept let's talk about how we design it. Basically the device is composed of three components:

1. An embedded platform. We have chosen an ARM9 chip called 'I.MX27' from Freescale. It is a 400MHz chip with video acceleration on both encoding and decoding. It also contains enough interfaces to support other peripherals like USB, Wifi, and Bluetooth. I will put more information on our hardware devices later.


2. An operating system. It's no doubt that we will choose open source softwares for our low budget device. We have successfully ported Linux onto the platform with most of the drivers working so far.


3. Web Browser. Basically we will derive a standalone browser based on the Webkit. It really depends on the performance and features.

So what does it look like? Below I will show some of the very primilary pictures about how our development goes.

From 200 Dollar Tablet Project

This is our development board from LogicPD. It is called I.MX27 Litekit and is not that expensive (around $700). So actually you can buy one and build the tablet yourself!

From 200 Dollar Tablet Project

Our interfacing LCD is a 7inch TFT from Samsung. There is also a touch panel on top of it to act like a touchscreen.

From 200 Dollar Tablet Project

Ok, here is a overview of all the development equipments. We can't afford fancy equipments like JTAG debugging tools yet and we know it looks extremely simple. But wait, I used to heard a lot from my teacher in colleague that 'Real Engineer Makes Things Simple'.