The One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to give every child in the world a laptop, announced on Thursday that it was entering a partnership with Marvell, a computer chip and silicon manufacturer.
They agreed to work together to develop a new family of tablet computers for the project. The computers will be based on Moby, an existing platform built by Marvell. The partnership hopes to allow Marvell to sell inexpensive tablet computers for education and health care in the United States while helping to reduce the cost of the project’s computers for developing countries.
Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the laptop project, said in a telephone interview that the partnership was meant to drive scale, which would in turn reduce the cost of the devices.
The price of the tablets is supposed to hover around $100, but Mr. Negroponte said the ones distributed by the project could cost less, possibly $75. “The consumer marketplace is what will help drive the volume to help drive down prices,” he said.
The new tablets will offer a bevy of high-tech parts, including a full high-definition video encoder and 3-D graphics chip, which will enable them to interact with software like Adobe Flash. In addition, the tablet will have a built-in video and still camera, a multitouch display and a soft keyboard similar to that of the Apple iPad. Mr. Negroponte said the new keyboard would also have haptic feedback so users will feel the keys vibrate on the screen as they type.
Although the project’s version of the device will run the traditional Sugar operating system as an application, the Marvell version could ship with the Android operating system from Google, the Windows Mobile platform or Ubuntu.
Weili Dai, a founder of Marvell and chief operating officer, said the company planned to show the first version of the tablet at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. Ms. Dai also said the first version of the tablet would ship with the Android operating system.
By working with Marvell, Mr. Negroponte said, the tablets will have a clean design, and be thin, measuring a height of 10.8 millimeters. In comparison, the iPad, is 12.7 millimeters.
Mr. Negroponte also stressed the importance of the open source nature of the project, pointing out that every aspect of the the project would still be open source. “We’re going to go totally open,” he said. “In some sense it’s the complete opposite of the Amazon bookstore or iTunes, where we’ll run anything, including viruses and Flash.”