Tech maven Arrington to build $200 Firefox web tablet

[NewsHottie]

Tired of waiting for an affordable and simple touch screen tablet to surf the web, Michael Arrington, the Silicon Valley maven of influential blog TechCrunch, decided to take matters into his own hands. He wants to create a $200 net tablet with a screen as thin as a MacBook Air. The Mac-like design will have just one button, turning it on and off. Running Firefox over Wi-Fi, he wants it to have half a gig of RAM and a 4GB solid-state hard drive.
Sure, other huge computer corporations are diving deep into the net tablet space, such as Dell with its $2500 Latitude XT, and Apple’s rumored Mac Tablet coming in Fall that’ll probably cost even more. But Arrington sees this as a people’s effort, and has already started working with a supply chain company to build the machine. Those tech types tell Arrington such a thin-screen Firefox Tablet could be built for a “few hundred dollars.”
Arrington is asking for help to write code for the new machine, and says once he gets a prototype up and running, he’ll give one to whomever helped him develop it, and then he’ll “open source the design and software and let anyone build one that wants to.” More power to you, Michael. This would turn the world upside down. We'd buy one in a heartbeat. Is this a genius idea or a fool’s errand?
Via Techcrunch


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