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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.'"
Earlier prototypes used an Atom CPU, I doubt that's changed. And the connectivity is some sort of wifi, presumably g, maybe n.
It looks like a neat device, and I'm definitely interested in the cheap lightweight tablet form factor and market niche. But when I think about purchasing it I can't help comparing it in my head to the super-sized iPod tablet Apple is rumored to be working on.
The crunchpad's 12" screen is nice compared to the 8-10" expected from apple, but the atom and big screen are going to make for really crappy battery life compared to an ARM based 8-10" solution, and the Apple version will be able to do more than just web surf (a version of the iPhone SDK and app store seems inevitable). However, while the crunchpad may have missed it's $200 price target in favor of $300, the rumors of Apple's $600+ price point were never in that league to begin with.
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