Leaked Pics of CrunchPad Elicit Progress Update

TechCrunch has released a few more technical details, pictures, and general comments about their CrunchPad project as a recent accidental leak saw a new round of images posted to the web. It seems that the tablet has continued to grow and evolve with the help of an Intel Atom chip (as opposed to the Via chip previously used), new software from Fusion Garage, and a bottom-up Linux install. "I wanted something I couldn't buy, and found people who said it could be built for a lot less than I imagined. The goal — a very thin and light touch screen computer, sans physical keyboard, that has no hard drive and boots directly to a browser to surf the web. The operating system exists solely to handle the hardware drivers and run the browser and associated applications. That's it."

Comments

Software agnostic is the key to success

[alegrepublic]

A piece of hardware like this is badly needed, but the key is that any such device should be totally independent of the software installed. People then could choose to install anything they want on it. My ideal tablet would behave exactly like a notebook computer without the need to have custom software or modify existing desktop environments. One way to achieve that would be to have a touchscreen plus 3 additional hardware buttons that interact with the OS at the lowest level possible (maybe even below driver level). The 3 buttons should work like this:

• A button to show a virtual keyboard so that the OS receives key-press events
• A button to send drag events so that the OS receives button-pressed-while-mouse-moving events when pressed
• A button to cycle between left, middle and right clicks as the event sent to the OS when the user touches the screen

Any OS would think it was running in a regular notebook with a regular keyboard and a regular mouse, so the hardware would not be handicapped by the lack of available custom software. I see no reason why a tablet like this does not exist today, as there are lots of things one could do with it even if CPU power was low. The Nokia N8xx tablets were close to this goal, but their dependence on custom software (applications had to be hildonized) made them much less useful than they could have been otherwise.