Marvell, the maker of mobile computer chips, has created an innovative device to help out our troubled school system. With the rising costs of school districts all over the country, the laying off of our teachers and slashing school budgets, this is truly a great netbook that can help in many ways. Marvel has made a long-term commitment to supporting education at all levels and is now the largest sponsor of the “One Laptop per Child” program.

Weili Dai, Marvell Co-founder said that the Moby Tablet is a “technology whose time had come.” Marvel has designed a part e-reader, part netbook and Web browser for a low affordable price of $99.00.

Read more after the break!

The Moby is an ultra thin light-weight ARM-powered high-performance low-power Marvell® ARMADA™ 600 series application processor tablet that supports Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and has an FM radio. It runs both the Android and the Windows mobile platform. This is a Linux running eReader for Textbooks, has Full Flash Internet, with live 1080 HD Content. The Moby has 3D Modeling and Gaming Graphics with Live Conferencing and Social Media capabilities. The Moby Tablet is designed for long-battery life. Marvell’s Moby delivers a high performance multimedia tablet.

This device has been designed to keep textbooks current, cut costs and take away the load of books students carry around in their backpacks.  This has been a concern of mine for years, since they took away the lockers in the schools. School bags are way too heavy, I have seen small sized children toting an enormous amount of weight on their shoulders.  The rise of neck and shoulder injuries to children has been attributed to  carrying 15% of their body weight inschool supplies. The concept when this policy went into effect was that students would be provided with a set of books at school and another set for home, that theory did not work out. Students have been carrying all of their books back and forth to school each day.  The weight of the Moby is expected to hold a full year’s worth of books, but weigh less than half of one typicaltextbook.

The rising cost of textbooks according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), is that the average cost of a single textbook for a secondary school student can range from $60 to $200. The cost has continued to spiral out of control, book prices have risen 30 percent in four years. At the university level, according to the GAO, the average estimated cost of books and supplies for a first-time, full-time college student in 2003 and 2004 was $898 at four-year public institutions. The cost is becoming unattainable by either the schools or the students themselves.

Marvell is planning a pilot program in partnership with the District of Columbia Public Schoolsystem (DCPS) where the Company will donate a Moby tablet to every child in an at-risk school as part of a multi-year program in new media and learning.
Marvell has zeroed in on a three major problems pertaining to our troubled school system and our students. By creating a low cost tablet that can replace a year of books for $99 is a great start. Thousands of dollars per classroom can be saved yearly. One of the problems with the printedtextbook is that by the time the students actually receive them they are already out of date. With the Moby tablet they can all be updated automatically, and with the most important that I am actually thrilled about is finally the concern for our student’s health and safety.

Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit says, “Education is the most pressing social and economic issue facing our country and our times. I believe the Marvell Moby tablet can ignite a life-long passion for learning in all students everywhere. Marvell’s goal is to fundamentally improve the way students learn by giving them more efficient, relevant — even fun tools to use. Marvell’s Moby tablet recognizes that every student learns differently and so it delivers an array of media choices for different learning styles.”

“Marvell can help propel education into the 21st century with an all-in-one device that gives students access to the best live content, information and resources the world has to offer – from books and online sources, in text, video, news, music, data expression or any medium. With Moby tablet, students can conduct primary research, reach out directly to the world’s leading subject experts and even collaborate with one another around the globe. Best of all, the device is highly affordable. I envision Marvell’s Moby tablets to benefit all students around the world.”

Dai also addresses our public school libraries, according to a study by the New York Library Association, the average book in New York public school libraries is between 21 to 25 years old. The electronic versions of textbooks can also be continuously updated and refreshed in the library system.

This is definitely the first step in the right direction, with the rising costs of our educational system it seems this is the most realistic approach to addressing many problems attributed to it.

Another product by Marvell is the ARMADA 100 series eReaders, with high-performance Sheeva™ CPU cores running up to 1.2 GHz and a high level of peripheral integration, including a 5-in-1 card reader, USB host and OTG clients. These processors also offer the option of either low-power Mobile DDR or low-cost DDR2 memory, allowing for very competitive system pricing.

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