As we all know, the Kindle Fire’s hot, Apple’s selling bushels of iPads, and there’s plenty of Honeycomb slates out there for you to choose from, but what if you want a tablet free from corporate influence? Enter Spark, a seven-inch slate that comes running the Plasma Active UX, an open-source OS based on Linux kernel, KDE’s multi-platform Plasma environment and a dash of Qt for good measure. Now, this isn’t just a consumer tablet — Spark’s aimed at “those who love writing great software… using the typical Linux tools” — but it will offer access to ebooks from Project Gutenberg, plus Qt and QML apps, too. It’s powered by a 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor, has a Mali-400 GPU and comes with 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage, plus an SD card slot for future expansion. Modest underpinnings, to be sure, but for €200 ($262), you can’t expect quad core silicon, right? Naturally, order and delivery dates remain a mystery, but plenty of other info about the open-source slate can be found at the source below.

Meet Spark, the €200 slate packing Linux-based Plasma Active UX originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:14:00 EST.