By Murmurings of a tablet version of Project Tango have been swirling about for a few weeks now, but those murmurings have just been converted into official word — the Project Tango Tablet has been officially unveiled. If you’re not sure what Project Tango is, it’s a project Google is using to develop compact, portable devices with image sensors that can understand depth and map 3D surroundings like no device in its class has been able to do before.
You can pretty much think of it as the same technology being used in Google’s self-driving vehicles, except in tablet and smartphone form. We’re not sure what their ultimate vision is for these devices just yet, though we imagine Google will want developers to help shape that vision.
The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion
That’s why this device isn’t necessarily meant for consumers. It’s a developers’ kit — one that costs $1,024, funnily enough — and comes packed with a suite of specs that we wish we could have in today’s flagship tablets and / or smartphones.
Here’s what developers will be looking forward to inside the body of this thing:
- NVIDIA Tegra K1 chipset with 192 GPU cores
- 4GB of RAM
- 7-inch display
- 128GB of internal storage
- 4G LTE (availability depends on region and carrier)
- Bluetooth 4.0 LE
- WiFi
- Motion tracking camera
- Integrated depth sensor
- Android 4.4 KitKat
Again, this is for serious developers who want to help Google decide how this technology can fit into modern society and help change the way our devices work for us. You can sign up for a chance to receive a kit at Google’s site right now, though if you’re going to Google I/O later this month we hear these will be up for grabs as part of the annual freebie parade. Let’s hope Google gives us a better sense of how these devices can help us when they take the stage in San Francisco June 25th.
nice but….tablet.
not interested.
A grand for an android tablet? I’m not feelin it.
I’m blowing nearly a grand on Z97, but that’s worth it.
with google a price like $1024 is not a coincidence.
That’s Google for you. Lots of great innovative ideas, just nothing concrete …. At least yet
Something like this could really help with spatial analysis field work. I’m intrigued.
True, it is expensive, but the Nexus 10 QHD, was $1,000 too a year and a half ago, I got mine for $300 recently. The specs are great, I’d like to see a UHD tablet in 7″, if we can already manage QHD in 5″, why not ? My 39″ UHD TV only costs $400 US, they used to be $10,000, Samsung has been showing off a 12″ UHD tablet. Apple beat us to the post FHD display and 64 bit, I’d like to see us launch UHD, before them, not after. Cameras only need 8 MP to record in UHD, my Amlogic S802 can run Kit Kat in UHD, for $133. True, it has video and audio drops, but that’s because of cheap Chinese work, not the backing OS and hardware. Mali 450, 2 GB of DDR 3 RAM, 16 GB of flash does the job fine, via a USB 2 stick. If I can get an hour of FHD to fit in 0.8 GB and download in 4 minutes, over copper phone line WiFi, or LTE advanced on my Nexus 5, at 8 MB/s, must be a lot of error checking going on, it ought to only take a minute and a half. Then with 192 Nvidia GPUs, economy of scale mathematics, especially in 64 bit, an hour and a half UHD movie, can come in at 3 GB, in a quarter of an hour. That’s 27 UHD movies in just 81 GB, with 47 GB to spare in a $100 micro SD card at 128 GB with Cat 10, a $72 USB 3 stick at 128 GB. It can be shuffled around at 1 GB/s on WiFi ac, like my Nexus 5; 5 GB/s on USB 3, so give me UHD in 7″, give it to me soon, before Apple beats us to the punchline again. Got to do something, with those GSLAM / VDSL copper phone lines, at 50 MB/s when they come in, giving us 3 minute downloads of UHD movies.