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Arrington's Web Tablet Nearly Ready For Launch?
narramissic writes "The 'dead simple and dirt cheap' touchscreen Web tablet that Michael Arrington of TechCrunch set out to build last July seems to be nearing completion, writes blogger Peter Smith. 'The CrunchPad is a Linux-based touchscreen tablet using a browser-based UI. When you turn the unit on, it boots right into the webkit-based browser. There's a pop-up virtual keyboard for entering URLs and such (you wouldn't want to do any significant typing on it) and scrolling is via swiping the screen. When Arrington first visualized the project he was shooting for a $200 price point, then discovered that a $299 price was more realistic.'"
The resolution looks about what the mockups show. You can find a shot of the actual thing here.
The second link from the slashdot summary, describing the current product, is extremely short, and is essentially the same text as the slashdot summary. A longer and better article is here. This page has technical specs: 12-inch touchscreen (1024x768 4:3), via nano, 1 GB ram, 4 GB flash, wifi, accelerometer, camera, 3 lb, currently running ubuntu.
Sorry, but $300 is not "dirt cheap," IMO. Zareason.com or system76.com will routinely sell you a full-featured desktop system for $300. WalMart and Sears have sold desktop machines like the Everex gPC as cheap as $200. Target has had the eeePC for $280. This is not even something you'd want to use as a full-function computer, so I'd say $300 is actually pretty expensive. Of course some people may be willing to pay for style or convenience. But as far as convenience, I'm not convinced I'd want something portable like this that didn't have a lid to protect the screen.
"Dirt cheap" is going to be ARM-based computers retailing for $50-100, which we'll probably have within a few years.
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ARM9 @ 600mHZ, 512MB Ram, Linux 2.6. Wifi connectivity (B, G, and N). X is used for the display, so it should be about 5 minutes before you can use this as a remote X client. 10 minutes and it will be replacing $2000 wacom tablets.
Have a look at here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrunchPad.
It's supposedly running an ubuntu variant, so debian should be fine. In the recent video of it the narrator apologised for the loading times claiming that they were "on a 3G connection".