22 July 2008

Time for the Firefox Tablet?

For all its faults, TechCrunch is arguably the leading tech blog. But it has been content to remain on the sidelines - commenting rather than jumping in. Until now:

I’m tired of waiting - I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

What's interesting about this - aside from the fact it marks a major shift for TechCrunch - is that it takes for granted that GNU/Linux and Firefox will be the foundation of such a system. Indeed, it is remarkably close to the story I posted below.

As for the name "Firefox Tablet", I say: go for it, Mark....

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What about nokia's n800 / n810? I thought these were relatively low cost and had decent support.

Glyn Moody said...

I get the impression this is rather bigger physically and very much based around Firefox as the virtual OS - see the comments on the TechCrunch post.

josh said...

i dont care if these things even barely run. this is what i need. if someone could send me a link where i can buy one or contact info to the group making these so i can get one from them that would be great. email joshweaver20@comcast.net

Glyn Moody said...

I'm sure TechCrunch will announce it with due fanfare: just keep an eye on their site.