“I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. … Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it…”

Great idea Mr. Arrington! This could be the first open source hardware - people who are willing to participate can leave a comment on TechCrunchIT - almost 1000 users did so already. And then? What’s the plan?

“We’ll organize a small team of people to spec this out. First is the marketing document that just outlines what the machine will do - we have a first draft of that already and will post it soon. Then we’ll spec out the hardware and get people to help write the customized Linux and Firefox code. Once we’ve completed the design we’ll start to work with the supply chain company to get an idea on the cost of the machine (the goal is $200), and hopefully build a few prototypes.
The goal is to keep the machine very simple and very cheap. I think this will be a lot of fun, and it may just turn into an actual product that we can use to surf the web and talk to our friends.”

We’ll keep you informed!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Gadgets, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.