I’m happy to announce that today we finalized a partnership with Marvell to design a line of education-focused tablet computers. Some of these will be OLPC machines targeted for the developing world, such as the XO-3. The line will be based both on Marvell’s reference design for its Moby tablet and on OLPC’s XO-3 designs (particularly for the low-power end of the line). 

Update: see also this video of Nicholas discussing our current tablet plans.

The first tablets in the line will be based closely on the Moby, ”’not”’ the XO-3, and focused more on children in the developed world. They will be on display at CES 2011 in January, and available next year for under $100. The original XO-3 design is still planned for 2012.  More details after the jump.

Some background: Marvell is a long-time supporter of OLPC and one of our founding Board members, with a deep organizational interest in education. They supplied the wireless chips used in the XO designs to date, and have contributed related testing and debugging. This partnership marks a much more serious collaboration in hardware design.

The Moby is currently being piloted in at-risk schools in Washington DC, and Marvell is investing in a Mobylize campaign to improve tech adoption within US classrooms. This should help lower-case olpc move forward in the developed world — we still lag behind many European and Asian countries in both bandwidth and classroom technology.

OLPC are moving forward with our XO-1.75 designs for an lower-power ARM-based version of the current XO design — this will be the next model for our target schools. The XO-3 is still planned for late 2012, and will benefit from the experience of both the 1.75 and the Moby efforts.

Weili Dai, Marvell’s co-founder, says about the partnership:

“The Moby tablet platform – and our partnership with OLPC – represents our joint passion and commitment to give students the power to learn, create, connect and collaborate in entirely new ways. I am immensely proud of the capability of our Moby tablet and I am extremely honored to partner with the inventor of the netbook market for education, Dr. Nicholas Negroponte. I applaud his leadership, vision, passion and together we will make the world a better place.”