The altruistic and struggling One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has junked the idea of producing a $100 third-generation laptop in favor of a $75 tablet developed by Marvell Technologies and based on Marvell's Moby reference design.

The project's founder Nicholas Negroponte described the widget to the Wall Street Journal as a combination laptop, iPad and Kindle with a dual-mode display visible both indoors and outside in direct sunlight.

It'll probably run Android to start, probably have a nine-inch screen and use Marvell's 1GHz ARM SoC. It could be in prototype by December and show up at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

OLPC has stopped being snooty about mature markets and says it'll deliver a range of the things to schools in both the U.S. and emerging countries. It's apparently figured out that volume is key to price.

Marvell is also launching a Mobylize campaign aimed at seeing the thing adopted in U.S. classrooms.

This new XO tablet is supposed to need only a watt of power to operate compared to the roughly 5 watts necessary for the current XO laptop and feature a multi-lingual soft keyboard with touch feedback that supports virtually any language. The device is also supposed to have access to the two million free books available on the Internet.

OLPC claims commercial tablets don't meet educational needs.

The widget promises to have Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM/GPS connectivity, a built-in camera for video conferencing, high-performance 3D graphics, long battery life and support Adobe Flash, Windows Mobile and Ubuntu.