Eh, those kiddos don’t need no physical keyboards and power cranks, right? Right! In a presumed effort to both keep with the times and take advantage of what’s being served to them on a silver platter, the philanthropic souls over at One Laptop Per Child have teamed with Marvell in order to develop the nextOLPC — which, predictably, will be a tablet. The forthcoming range of XO tablets will be based on Marvell’s newly loosed ‘Moby‘ reference design (which we recently toyed with), and given that purported $99 price tag, you can see why the tie-up makes sense. The slate will require but one watt of power to operate (compared to ~five watts on the existing XO laptop), and it’ll include a multilingual soft keyboard with touch feedback in order to serve various regions of the globe. As for specs, we’re told that the device will boast an ARMADA 610 application processor, “gigahertz processor speed,” 1080p encode / decode capabilities, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio support, a GPS module and the ability to play back 3D graphics and Adobe Flash videos (zing!). There’s also an integrated camera for live video conferencing, not to mention Moby’s ability to support Android, Windows Mobile and / or Ubuntu. All we’re told about battery life is that it’s designed “expressly” to last a good, long while, and scarily enough, there’s no confirmation anywhere that these will actually cost less than a Benjamin whenever they ship. Fingers crossed, though.

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