Is It, Or Isn’t It?

Quixotic Web 2.0 personality Michael Arrington has been on a quiet quest for the past few months to create an inexpensive web tablet.

Now photos of the device, called Crunchpad, have leaked online. Dustin Curtis, a user interface designer, posted four photos of a sweet-looking machine that could potentially compete with netbooks.

Arrington first wrote about the idea of a tablet in June last year. He suggested a touchscreen device that would run Firefox and maybe Skype on top of a Linux kernel.

“The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone,” wrote Arrington. The Crunchpad would also have Wi-Fi, 512 MB of memory, 4 GB solid state hard drive and no keyboard.

Kudos to Wired for unearthing this and they deserve full attribution. No you can’t have one — at least not yet. This ‘chrunchpad’ is not even in production. What is in the photos are mockups.

But hey Arrington you are missing a venue that would make this a big seller. throw an epub reader into the software mix, add some touch along the bottom edge of the screen to scroll/flip with and you have a Kindle killer. Oh and don’t forget to allow both portrait and landscape.

All this and he is thinking of Open Sourcing the design so others can embellish the design. Arrington is hitting all the buttons in the right places. The target price of $200-250 is sweet.

Linky.

[Update!] Saints be praised! I was wrong. Arrington has more than just mockups. They have some working prototypes! I like this even better now. Takes it out of the vaporware category and into the ‘hope they make this’ bucket. More here.