CrunchPad Will Be a 'Dead Simple Web Tablet' 145
Hugh Pickens writes "TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has been talking for a year about building a touch-screen tablet for Web surfing and now it appears that the CrunchPad is close to becoming a reality. 'We're going to make some really big announcements,' said Arrington, who predicted a prototype would be ready for unveiling by the end of July. The purpose of the CrunchPad will be very simple: surfing the Web. Turn it on and up comes a browser — 'an Internet consumption device,' for reading, checking e-mail or watching video. The CrunchPad will not have a hard drive or keyboard and photos of the latest prototype show a device with a 12 inch screen. 'The screen is now flush with the case and we've decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm,' writes Arrington. 'The case will be aluminum, which is more expensive than plastic but is sturdier and lets us shave a little more off the overall thickness of the device.' The CrunchPad boots directly into the browser with a Linux-based operating system and a WebKit-based browser. A video of an earlier CrunchPad prototype in action shows a device which, unlike the iPhone, runs flash. 'The next time we talk about the CrunchPad publicly will be at a special press and user event in July in Silicon Valley,' writes Arrington. 'We're full on. These prototypes are real.'"
Re:Wanna sell them like hot bread ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Build an embedded system, hook to your LAN that serve an Remote Control Webpage...Emitting IR when command is received.
Re:It needs some method of data entry (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who uses the Ipod touch onscreen keyboard, and has huge gorilla hands, an onscreen keyboard on a 12" screen will be a piece of piss. Of all the criticisms of the Crunchpad, this is the one that baffles me the most.
Re:Once more around the block my friend (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a challenging use case. For the form factor we're talking about, lacking a keyboard but being very thin, having limited proc, and being only marginaly cheaper than a netbook, the real competition in its market is paper. If this thing isn't as useful as paper, why bother getting this for someone to use when an actual nominal "computer" is only marginally more expensive.
I think it's clear that someday something like this will replace a lot of paper, not all of it, but lots of ephemera. I already use my knidle to read my screenplays, and that's already saved 500 sheets in the past 3 months. If something like the kindle had better searching and browsing, and could actually read HTML documents in the manner they were intended, I could be keeping phonebooks full of film codebooks and sound library stuff in their right now.
Something I've noticed with my iPhone, on the other hand, despite the fact that it's a little small to use properly as paper, is that it's extremely difficult to be browsing something on my computer, and then to continue my browsing session on the phone, or vice versus. The only way to do it is to email links to yourself, and that's a supreme pain.... Something I still think about from Minority Report were the larger pad-like storage devices they used to move files from one rig to another, like when Tom Cruise's assistant would look up a series of mugshots on one machine and bring them over to his. The assistant would collect the mugshots, drag them off his screen and ONTO the screen of the pad, as if the pad, by nature of touching the computer, were an extension of his monitor, and then he could take the pad, which had a display and could show everything it held, and carried it to the other computer. From there, the pad then became an extention on Anderton's monitor, and he could look at the material directly on the pad or drag it to his system, completing the loop. Why the fuck can't someone build an internet tablet that can do that? All that haptic stuff was cool, but for some reason, in my work, I'm constantly wishing I could take something I'm working on at this moment, drag it to a pad, and carry it somewhere, perhaps to move, perhaps just to work in-situ on the pad.