Video: $200 Chrome OS Tablet by Freescale

So it does exist. I had heard that there was going to be a Chrome OS tablet at the Mobile World Congress, and sure enough we finally see in a somewhat lengthy video the folks from Freescale showing off their prototype with a 7″ screen. This was the same model that was shown at CES running Android. The cost? Around $200, running on hardware in the form factor of their model known as the i.MX51. The video shows some locally cached video playback in HTML5.

This is just an observation, but it seems to me that other tablets are going to have a hard time competing against a tablet product that is only a couple of hundred dollars. But let’s face it: this is just a tablet, and there is only so much you can do with them. I’m not even sure how comfortable one would even be to use. Of course I have to admit I have never actually used one.

But in the demo you see that the Freescale product manager is using a mouse and a keyboard. Probably because the touch capabilities and interface for Chrome OS on tablets is not nearly complete. Earlier today I wrote about the business Chrome OS coming out and I explored the concept of Google having several different versions of their operating system. I feel like this demo gives more proof to that concept. The device itself is capable of touch, as they also showed a tablet running some variation of Linux that had capacitive input.

But for a couple of bills and with an ARM processor, how could you go wrong? It even appears to have a camera. That explains the large bezel.