Another slick Tegra tablet appears, running Android

We’ve already established that 2010 will be the year of the tablet, but now it looks like Google’s Android platform could become a key player.

Notion Ink is the latest company to reveal its tablet plans, and as with Dell and ICD before it, Android will provide the operating system. The screen size is 10.1 inches, with 1024-by-600 resolution, and the form looks pretty cool, almost alien-like.

Specs sound pretty good, running on an unannounced NVidia Tegra T20 chipset, with built-in mobile broadband, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. No word on RAM, but there’s either a 16 GB or 32 GB solid state drive on board, plus an SD card slot. Outputs include HDMI, USB and headphones, and there’s microphone input and a 3-megapixel video camera.

Slashgear reckons that the most interesting part of this tablet is its Pixel Qi display, which is an LCD screen that stays readable in sunlight like e-ink. But I’m also impressed with the supposed 16 hours of Internet use on a charge (48 hours standby) and ability to play 1080p video with only an occasional dropped frame.

As I mentioned, the operating system is straight-up Android. Hopefully that’ll mean access to the Android Market, though Notion Ink says they’ve developed their own applications, including Office-like productivity tools and Flash-based titles, so I’m not sure.

We don’t yet know how much this thing will cost, and because no one has actually released a tablet yet, we don’t have a frame of reference for how much it should cost. A few hundred dollars seems reasonable, because you can get a netbook for the same price, but the one competing tablet whose price we do know, the JooJoo, will cost $500, and the JooJoo is just a simple Web tablet with no app support. Maybe the price of this device will be less because the operating system is ready-made, but I’m guessing this’ll be a luxury item whenever it reaches stores.