Designing a dedicated web tablet

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has issued a call to create a "dirt cheap touch screen web tablet" that will be used primarily to surf the Internet. The basic idea is to give it relatively low-end specifications and squeeze it all into the form factor of Apple's Macbook Air. The device will run nothing more than a customized fork of Firefox on top of a lean Linux kernel.

Apparently, a supply chain management company has said that such a machine can be created for just "a few hundred dollars." The goal though, is to get it down to below $300. So what's next now? Well, the marketing documents are being outlined, after which the specifications for the hardware will be drawn up. The response from the community to get this moving seems to be overwhelming so far. Check out the project page here.

For more on this Web Tablet:
- check out this article from TechCrunch