KDE Vivaldi Tablet Upgraded, Closer To Release

The KDE Vivaldi Tablet, which has been a project led by Aaron Seigo for having a Linux-friendly tablet powered by Plasma Active and Mer Core, is finally getting closer to hopefully seeing the light of day.

This project has been going on for more than a year and originally was conceived as the KDE Spark Tablet, but then renamed to Vivaldi. In September of last year as the tablet project was struggling, they switched to a new design.

There hasn't been any exciting Vivaldi news in some time, but now Aaron Seigo has a new blog post with details. When it comes to the Vivaldi tablet hardware, he says the SoC PCB is done, the MeeGo-forked Mer Core is booting on the hardware, Plasma Active is starting while X11 is running but they are still working on OpenGL, drivers are still being baked, and the tablet casing is still being tweaked.

Seigo acknowledges that Vivaldo has had months of unexpected delays, but he did have some good news to share in his blog post. He says they have managed to upgrade the SoC to using a dual-core processor rather than single-core as was originally the plan. A dual-core ARM processor is nicer although now we're at a time when many tablets are beginning to use quad-core Cortex-A9s or dual-core Cortex-A15s. Aaron won't say what SoC is being used by the Vivaldi other than the new dual-core part is pin-compatible with the single-core version. He also says they managed to upgrade the screen too, but he isn't ready to post the official specifications yet.

Right now they are still working on sourcing the manufacturing of the Vivaldi tablet and other tasks, but they appear to be back on the right track now and sounds like soon there will be more information on this KDE Plasma Active-powered tablet. Read more in Aaron's blog post.

While Aaron didn't officially reveal the tablet specifications, on his blog he embedded a video (also embedded below). The video shows off Debian running on a QiMod A10 EOMA68 CPU Card. Thus while not officially announced, we'd imagine the Vivaldi Tablet specs will be (or close to that) of the Rhombus Tech EOMA68-A10 with having an Allwinner A10 Cortex-A8, 1GB of RAM, up to 16GB of NAND flash, and ARM Mali 400 graphics.