Low-Cost, Open-Source Web Tablet Comes to Life

The growing category of very inexpensive laptops, spearheaded by netbooks and One Laptop Per Child's vision of the $100 laptop, may soon have another offering.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who voiced an open call last July for a "dead simple touchscreen Web tablet that boots right into the browser," costs $200, and is open source, has reported that a second -- and better -- prototype for such a device is now up and running. He calls it the CrunchPad, and others have described it as a netbook without the keyboard.

'Open Source the Specs'

In his original posting, Arrington asked for help in creating the new device. "Nothing fancy" like the $2,500 Dell Latitude XT, he wrote. "Just a MacBook Air-thin touchscreen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel." And, once built, he proposed to "open source the specs" so that anyone could build one.

Arrington said he wanted one to sit on his lap so he could easily and comfortably browse Web pages related to TV programs -- or, since the device would play Flash video, he could watch movies or TV shows from Hulu, YouTube or Joost. Music playing, video chatting, and e-mail would round out the capabilities. By focusing on the browser, Arrington said, the device could use very low-end hardware.

In August, Prototype A was built with an aluminum case "twice as thick as it needs to be," and performance that offered more potential than actual. "It barely booted," Arrington admitted, but it was enough of a demonstration that he knew he wanted one that worked well.

Now the project has a team lead, Louis Monier, the founder and chief technical officer of AltaVista and former head of eBay's Advanced Technology Group. And Prototype B is now ready.

'Browser as OS'

Prototype B sports a 12-inch, 1024x768 touchscreen, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and a Via Nano processor. Arrington wrote that the processor performs comparably to Intel's Atom processor, used in its netbooks.

The prototype has a gigabyte of RAM, and a 4GB flash drive for the operating system, browser and Web cache. Other features include Wi-Fi, an accelerometer that lets the device reposition a Web page when the machine is turned, a camera, and a four-cell battery.

The weight is about three pounds and, although his original vision was for a $200 price tag, Arrington said something under $299 is more realistic.

The prototype runs a full install of the Ubuntu Linux open-source operating system, with a custom Webkit browser. The user experience and feature set are being built by Singapore-based FusionGarage, whose blog touts its enthusiasm for "the browser as an operating system."

Arrington said the effort has received "thousands" of e-mails, with many expressing a desire to own a CrunchPad. He also noted "quite a bit of interest" from potential investors, adding that the decision hasn't been made whether a company will be spun off to produce units for sale.