Motorola Mobility has been talking about Android-based cable boxes for a while now, and it appears there’s a little crossbreeding with the tablet and phone groups going on in the labs: we’ve just received these images of a 6-inch Android 2.3 tablet code named “Corvair” that’s designed for use in the living room.
It communicates with other devices over IR or RF4CE using Wi-Fi. There is a 4000mAh battery inside to provide the juice for all the wireless interfacing and whatever else the device is capable.
The lack of any hardware specifications suggest that the device isn’t running on a particularly powerful chipset, so it could just be a very fancy remote controller for whatever device it is designed for.
Not much is known about the Motorola Corvair at the moment except for what is available to us from the box in the images posted by The Verge. On the box, it is called a “dedicated controller”, and based on the tablet’s UI being beamed on the TV screen, we can assume that content can be shared between the TV and tablet and vice versa.
Despite a battery capacity of 4000mAH, it’s hard to see a device such as this having a long battery life, so it may well ship with an optional charging dock too, so you don’t have to trail wires over your living room to keep it charged.
At this point, Corvair is still in its infancy, so we may not see it on the market in the immediate future, but it is interesting to see a company like Motorola working on such products, especially considering that Logitech already has a strong presence in the high-end remote control market with their line of Harmony controls.
