TechCrunch Wants to Make a $200 Tablet; We Are In!

Cheap mini-notebooks are hot, even hotter than a New York City subway platform I have to stand on before coming to work every day. The highly mobile devices are hot for three reasons: they are cheap, they are small, and they let you connect to the Net easily on the go. Of course, I have seen almost all the mini-notebooks on the market and my biggest frustration is that the keyboards and trackpads can be too small. Which is why touch is an inevitable outcome for these minis. It is one of the reasons I am very much looking forward to some convertible netbooks, like the Gigabyte M912. It is my hope that the Gigabyte will let me turn around the screen and take the navigation reins with my finger. Which brings me to a post I came across from TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington’s today about a project to make a $200 slate that runs a simple Linux interface (I am picturing a Ubuntu Netbook remix type of OS). Arrington envisions this tablet looking like a few of the different systems we have talked about on our pages – like the rumored V12 dual touch screen laptop and the OLPC dual touch screen mini-laptop, but with just one screen. The multi-touch screen will work like the iPhone’s or the Dell XT’s. What makes his idea different (and yes it does sound a bit Negroponte-ish to me) is the fact that he sees the “dead simple Web tablet” being only $200 and only focused on Cloud Computing. I am totally on the bandwagon. I mean, who isn’t? A sleek slate with the Web apps is all I need on the go. My only request is that the keyboard have haptic feedback. It is my hope that the awesome, images of the the photoshopped OLPC -XO 2, V12 and now the TechCrunch Tablet, actually come to fruition sometime soon. I don’t know how patient I can be!