This isn't a real product; it's a reference design. What's unclear is whether 199 is what it will cost manufacturers to make or the price it will be on the street.

The article was published on Jan 4th 2010. According to the article, they were suppose to demo it during the CES which has already come and gone and since I didn't see any headlines regarding the $199 tablet from Freescale, I would assume they have already pushed their release dates to much later (or may have abandoned the plans).

An interesting up-and-coming alternative to a recently hyped, closed-platform tablet.

The specs:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co...

Also, an article saying they have it running android, chromium os, and ubuntu:

http://www.liliputing.com/2010/01/freescale-tablet-running-c...

Does anyone know if there's an easy way to get something like this to play with? It might be fun to start thinking about iPad killers.

I don't understand how a camera above the screen on this thing is even usable. Are you supposed to grab the tablet by its sides and aim it at you photo target? The tablet seems large enough to make such an operation unwieldy. Not to mention the need to somehow press a button to actually snap the shot in addition to using both hands to hold the thing....

Is it just me, or does it seem like the size specs are wrong? I would expect something way more flat than 14cm.

let's be honest here, noone would expect something "affordable" from Apple, they are a premium brand. It's like BMW coming out with a ~12,000 car....just won't happen.

The price of the unit is irrelevant. If it has a 3G modem you will need to sing up for $100/month data plan for 3years (much more outside the USA) So you are really buying a $3600 3year old computer