If you are not sold on the iPad and are commonplace of waiting for tablets from other PC makers to show up , judge getting your hands muddy with a tablet you may build on your own .
Liquidware , an open seed computer hardware company , is selling a $ 400tablet starter kit . The DIY pill is primarily target at developers who need to create a tablet of their dreams or spell specialized software program applications .
“ The Beagle tablet is a portable modular open informant handheld computer , ” pronounce Justin Huynh , director of product ontogeny at Liquidware . “ It ’s all about customizability and embedded development . ”
The tablet kit comprise a 4.3 - column inch OLED touchscreen that mounts directly on aBeagleBoard . The BeagleBoard is a single circuit card information processing system from Texas Instruments that comes with a 1 gigahertz central processing unit . There ’s also a stamp battery mental faculty and a 4 GB pre - formatted Coyote State card to boot Angstrom Linux . But exploiter can also start the Android operating system on it , says Huynh .
“ Everything is modular and snaps on or mount directly on a board so you have a very thickset tablet - comparable equipment , ” he says .
Since Apple iPad ’s debut in April , tablets have realise a revitalization in popularity . Apple soldtwo million iPadsin just sixty Clarence Day of the Cartesian product ’s launch . That has left other companies shin to introduce tablets of their own . BothSamsung and Research In Motionhave tablet in development . In the U.K. , Dell has already introduced its first tablet called Streak , a 5 - column inch PlayStation Portable sized gadget that can also make earpiece call .
But those gadgets have little collection for tinkerer , says Huynh .
“ With the iPad , you would have a hard prison term hacking it to take from a specialised detector such as a temperature sensor or add your own usage hardware , ” he say . “ The Beagle tablet is all about foundation . ”
Since the Beagle tablet does n’t have any computer memory beyond the Mount Rushmore State card , it is extremely lightweight , press just about 8 ounce . Users can increase the size of the SD card or plug in an outside arduous driving or a solid state disk through the on - board USB port .
The stamp battery life of the Beagle tablet can deviate from three hours to six hour look on the coating , tell Hyunh .
The Beagle tablet is a lot of oeuvre since you would have to load everything from an OS to different applications . But once you get it decease , it could be a bigger conversation starter than the iPad .
Photo : Liquidware
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