Nvidia Tegra 250 to Power New Indian Tablets

Nvidia Tegra 250 to Power New Indian Tablets

Techtree News Staff, Mar 18, 2010 1902 hrs IST

Watch high definition movies, listen to music with new Nvidia chip powered tablets

Three tablets made by Indian companies - MagicTile by EAFT, Compal tablet by Compal and the recent showstopper Adam tablet by Notion Ink - will be powered by Nvidia's new Tegra 250 System-on-Chip.

Nvidia, on March 18, showed off the three Tegra 250 powered tablets at a press event in Mumbai. Nvidia Tegra 250 was earlier showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show 2010 in January. We got our hands on the MagicTile and Compal tablets, while Notion Ink's Adam was absent from the demonstration area.

Nvidia Tegra has 45nm fabrication process built dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs that run at clock speed of 1GHz and have eight independent processors. The new Tegra 250 has eight independent processors capable of handling 1080p HD video playback, decode and encode. Also, this SoC has 32-bit LP-DDR2 memory and has up to 12-megapixel camera sensor support. The Tegra 250 SoC also supports Adobe Flash 10.1 acceleration and Open GL ES 2.0 specifications. This means you can easily watch HD movies and videos on sites like YouTube.

At the event, Nvidia also showed demo of prototype Tegra 250 device running Unreal Engine 3 demo. Check out the video of the demo below.

After Notion Ink, the second Indian company to come up with tablet is - Everything At Finger Tips - EAFT. The Magic Tile tablet by Everything at Finger Tips (EAFT) runs Android OS and sports custom MagicTile user interface. Apart from Tegra 250 SoC, this tablet has 512MB RAM. Magic Tile has everything that a tablet requires; 7-inch Capacitive Touchscreen, 1.3megapixel camera, 4GB internal memory, microSD slot, optional 3G, WiFi (802.11 b/g/n), Bluetooth, HDMI out, and USB ports. Apart from that, MagicTile also has accelerometer and ambient light sensor. This tablet would be available in the third quarter of 2010.

Compal's tablet has similar specifications in terms of internal hardware like that of MagicTile, however, there are several differences. Compal tablet will come in 7-inch (800x480) and 10.1 (1024x600) touchscreen display sizes. Apart from that WLAN, Bluetooth and GPS are absent from this tablet. Surprisingly, this tablet will have 3G network support. Compal's Tablet will have 3 megapixel camera and 1.0Watt Stereo speakers. Other features remain, there's the Android OS, 4GB internal memory, HDMI out, Accelerometer, Ambient Light Sensor, USB and MicroSD slots.

Tegra 250 system on chip boasts about 140 hours of music playback and 16 hours of HD video playback on a single charge, consuming a total of about 1.5W. We're yet to test a working model with Tegra 250 to see if the chip is amazing in performance as well. Of course, the rest depends on the device manufacturers.

Hungama will make a content library of over 20,000 videos and two hundred plus movies for the Nvidia Tegra 250 powered devices.

All the tablets based on Tegra 250 SoC will compete directly with Apple's A4 SoC equipped iPad, though obviously keeping the price difference aside.

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Tag keywords

Nvidia Tegra 250 Tablets chips MagicTile EAFT Compal Adam Notion Ink Nvidia

Discussion Board

(4) Comments

ssj4Gogeta

,City, on Jul 16, 2010 07:42 PM

Tegra2 >> A4, at least in terms of processing power. A4 = Cortex A8 (in-order) with PowerVR gpu Tegra2 = dual-core Cortex A9 (out-of-order) with a gpu capable of 1080p encode/decode and dual display support But power consumption-wise A4 should be much better because it was tuned by Apple for power efficiency. Now if only Notion Ink and others can actually deliver on their promise and price these tablets on the cheaper side. Besides you also have the advantage of having a fully open platform with Android unlike Apple's "We decide what you can do with your device" policy.