New Spark Tablet To Come Loaded With KDE's Active Plasma Interface

mpol writes "KDE's Plasma Active introduced last Saturday its own 7" tablet. According to Aaron J. Seigo, 'It's the first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active pre-installed.' The Spark, with its 7" screen, is built around a Cortex A9 with a Mali-400-gpu, 512MB RAM and an SD-card slot. It will have a 800x480 screen resolution and will cost around 200 Euro. It is actually a rebrand of the Zenithink ZT-180 C71, which comes with Android by default. On a personal note, Aaron J. Seigo will no longer be sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks to work on Qt and KDE. He will, however, stay involved with KDE and Free Software, he says."

why the premium price ?

[Coeurderoy]

Since the KDE plasma tablet is the zenithink c71, why should the price be 200€ when the android version is 139 ?
Does Google sponsors the Android tablets that much ?

I do understand that the developpers expect to make some revenue for their work, but at this price it just kills the device...
A typical software licence in this domain is less than 20€ for the OS and 15€ for the codecs (and this would be for very small quantities....)
So the price should not be more than 175, and even then it should be marketed as "dual boot" Android and Linux (since you'd pay for Android anyway)

So it seems that the distribution channel is not under control, and most probably it will die just like other great technical ideas not correctly implemented
Sad ...

Re:To bad the specs once again suck donkey balls

[devent]

Why does the specs matters for a tablet (or for a netbook or notebook)? As long as it does what is suppose to do, meaning playing videos and show Pdfs, I really don't care if it's have 10 CPUs or just one. What matters is the whole product and if it's useable or better then the competition. I would wait for the product and for the reviews.

It may suck, but ...

[eyegone]

At least the KDE guys aren't trying to shove one uber-interface to rule them all down our throats.

A similar announcement from GNOME would have included a list of all the functionality that was removed from the desktop interface to make it tablet-friendly.