We wrote a few weeks back about the potential of the large iTouch tablet we. We hope it happens and believe it would be a real ‘killer device,’ but we have to wait in hope. Meanwhile the folk at Techcrunch are pursuing their dream of an affordable, basic touch screen web tablet that is ‘lite’ and basically running just a browser. They call their prototype the ‘CrunchPad’ and we believe it warrants some considerations as it aligns to many of the visions we have.
Its aim is to be cheap, very important in today’s climate. They were aiming for $200, but expect it would be higher. We believe it has to be under $200 and more like $100. It’s build as a tablet twelve inch touch screen offering 1024x 768 resolution with the concept being to be as thin as possible, have a single button for on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, a microphone and currently weighs in at 3 pounds. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. It will runs on open source linux, Firefox and Skype for VOIP.
Although the prototype looks 'industrial' and lacks some slick design casing it shows the potential.
They have a formidable team headed by Louis Monier, formerly the founder/CTO of AltaVista and previously also with eBay, Google and Cuil.
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