Leaked Pics of CrunchPad Elicit Progress Update 85
TechCrunch has released a few more technical details, pictures, and general comments about their CrunchPad project as a recent accidental leak saw a new round of images posted to the web. It seems that the tablet has continued to grow and evolve with the help of an Intel Atom chip (as opposed to the Via chip previously used), new software from Fusion Garage, and a bottom-up Linux install. "I wanted something I couldn't buy, and found people who said it could be built for a lot less than I imagined. The goal — a very thin and light touch screen computer, sans physical keyboard, that has no hard drive and boots directly to a browser to surf the web. The operating system exists solely to handle the hardware drivers and run the browser and associated applications. That's it."
Re:Kinda reminds me of a Chumby (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the article:
I hope that means $250 retail and not $250 manufacturer's cost. If it sells for $250 retail, this could be an excellent satellite device for the home. Assuming it performs well enough, that is. The real failure of many "web surfing" devices has always been poor usability caused by poor performance. Many also shipped with sub-standard browsers, which presumably wouldn't be the case here.
(As an aside, does anyone else think this looks like something Rodney McKay should be toting around? :-P)
Getting closer... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's too big. Cut the size in half and add mobile broadband options in addition to wifi. Otherwise it should be good.
It's essentially a PADD from Star Trek, and once someone figures out that copying that design will result in huge profits, we'll see some really cool gear.
Re:Kinda reminds me of a Chumby (Score:3, Insightful)
If what you actually want is just a desktop LCD with a touchscreen, than this isn't really the way to go. You can get those already, without the whole computer bit grafted on.
Re:Getting closer... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's the perfect size. Big enough for "real" websites and a large-ish touchscreen keyboard. Big enough for 2 people to watch Hulu on without eye strain. Still small enough to tote around the house with ease.
Half the size? Just buy an iPhone. Mobile broadband? C'mon, this thing isn't for watching movies in your car. Again, just buy an iPhone, or any number of other devices that already cater to that market.
IMO, this is the best "netbook" concept I've seen yet. If it can do just a bit more than just browse (handle video streamed from a MythTV box, for instance, and display ebooks/PDFs) then I'd love to have one. All the other netbooks I've seen have utterly failed to hit the sweet-spot for what I want out of a device that size.
Re:wait... what? (Score:2, Insightful)
...net appliances they were called, souped-down computers...
Yes, please.
Real-world users don't need a fraction of the horsepower in today's laptops. What they need (or at least what I need) is a drastically reduced feature set and concomitantly less demand from the hardware.
I use an Alphasmart Neo--700 hours of battery life on three 2As--that doesn't do enough to qualify as a Netbook, but it comes close.
A full-blown Linux OS seems like overkill, and Windows Vista is asinine.