Nvidia launches its own Tegra Note tablet platform

Nvidia has designed its own tablet platform, the Tegra Note, for its customers to adopt and brand as their own.

The $199 Android tablet is a reference design (a technical blueprint that for others to copy) that uses Nvidia’s Tegra 4 mobile processor.

“It elevates the abilities of our partners so they can provide tablets packed with innovation and features at prices they may not have been able to deliver on their own,” wrote Matt Wuebbling, the director of Tegra product marketing, in a blog post. “In turn, Nvidia gains access to their deep sales and distribution expertise in regions worldwide.”

The company showed off an early version of the device, the Tegra Tab, at the Computex trade show in Taiwan in June. It included Nvidia’s DirectStylus technology, which improves passive stylus performance. Nvidia applied its own expertise in industrial design, hardware, software, accessories, and game development.

A year ago, Nvidia launched Project Kai, a Tegra 3 reference design for low-cost tablets. The Google Nexus 7 was based on that design. Nvidia’s Tegra Note goes a step further by delivering a complete platform in addition to the hardware.

Customers will bring the Tegra Note to market in the coming months.

Among the adopters are EVGA and PNY Technologies in North America; EVGA, Oysters, and Zotac in Europe; Colorful, Shenzhen Homecare Technology, and ZOTAC in Asia-Pacific; and Xolo in India. Those customers of the reference design for Tegra Note will join other partners, including HP, Asus, Toshiba, Kobo and Xiaomi, that have already announced Tegra 4-based products.

The Tegra Note features Nvidia’s 72-core Tegra 4 chip with quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and a fifth battery-saver CPU core. It is a 7-inch tablet with rich sound, high-end front and rear cameras, TegraZone gaming, 10 hours of battery life for high-definition video playback, and a variety of accessories. It has 16GB of flash memory, upgradeable to 32GB.