When it comes to cheap tablets, we’re sure that many of you guys think of the Kindle Fire by Amazon or the Nexus 7 by Google/ASUS. Granted they’re not as cheap as some other tablets we’ve seen, but they do offer up better build quality and features. That being said, it looks like Texas Instruments might be hoping to cash in on the cheap tablet craze by partnering up with AllGo Embedded Systems. Both companies have collaborated on a new reference design for a tablet that they have recently announced, a reference design that can apparently help build Android 4.0 tablets for under $70.
Dubbed the Etab, this reference design is an extremely basic tablet and will be using a pretty old processor, specifically that of TI’s Sitara AM335X chip with an 800MHz Cortex A8 processor, a processor that was introduced back in 2006. The tablet is expected to feature a 7” display, a plastic casing, along with both WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. Given the rather aged chipset, this reference design does not appear to be intended for regular consumers. Instead it was suggested that it could be used by hardware developers looking to create a custom tablet, or used as embedded hardware for enterprises or even in the education sector.
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