All of you Linux lovers aren’t forgotten and it seems that the Spark Linux tablet that hit the news a couple of days ago will be available this month for pre-order. The product will ship in May and sport a price tag of $265, if the sources of the info are correct. More hardware and software details for this slate have just been released.
Originally the resolution of this tablet was unknown, but now it proves to be 800 x 480 on a 7 inch display and we also get a 1.3 megapixel front camera for videocalls and a 1GHz AMLogic processor with 512 MB RAM to accompany it. There’s also the already classic Mali 400 GPU available, plus 4 GB of internal storage, a microSD card slot and WiFi for connectivity purposes. Mer, a version of MeeGo Linux will run on the Spark and the KDE Plasma Active UI layer will be applied on top of Mer.
The purpose here is to make the Spark as open as possible so that users can customize their experience however they want. A recent Q&A revealed that the Spark tablet will not be based on the Android kernel, in spite of speculations in that area. Still, you can install Android on the tablet, if you want to. It’s theoretically possible to package a Dalvik runtime for Plasma Active and make it available on the Spark, but nobody has tried this just yet. The tablet ships in May, so there’s plenty of time to make plans.
