This is the sort of stuff I would be excepeting out of YCombinator startups. Instead we got mostly lame web 2.0 websites with no clear business model. Okay, that was a bit harsh, but still - I think most of the YCombinator applicants don't have enough ambition and the ideas are too focused on the web 2.0 world.

Hard to expect innovative hardware with only a couple grand in funding.

Weren't Apple's first machines built by two guys named Steve in a garage?

Apple was incorporated with a $250,000 investment. In today's dollars that's more like $800k.

Is this really that innovative? for $299, I can get a Dell mini 9 or countless other netbooks (some of which can be hacked to run OSX). In terms of providing value, give me a web 2.0 tool that helps my business or helps me lose weight or whatever... over this thing.

The other advantage of a laptop is that it includes a "kickstand" by default (the keyboard). When I'm laying on the couch, I have the laptop on my chest and use a wireless mouse.

There are different markets for "mobile general purpose computing devices" and "an easy device to surf the internet and keep up with the kids".

Yes, it is that innovative. It's awesome.

picwing.com: I know its different but it has similar end goals given time.

edit: Why don't you apply to YC with this idea if you can execute it :P

I agree. I would like to work on a hardware startup, but I wouldn't focus on consumer hardware like TechCrunch is. Once you start concentrating on the average Joe, the costs go way up. Industrial hardware is better for a garage startup environment.

thats because coding up a site doesn't take as much effort.

Here you'd need to figure out how to build it, then find a factory to build it, then figure out how to sell it to retailers, then figure out shipping etc etc

Looks like they might actually pull it off..

I didn't expect that, it certainly deserves some respect.

Very true. That's a pretty strong statement for Techcrunch; they could go from a one-man blog to a blog/event and now hardware "empire" in just 4-5 years. Even if the tablet is crap, that's quite an accomplishment.

There's a few others that have found success with similar methods:

  1. Build a blog, get large readership, convince them you're *awesome*!
  2. Release reasonable product
  3. Sell to blog readership

Very clever businessmodel.

Can you provide some examples? I'm curious.

I would say 37signals and FogCreek/Joel On Software.

I was thinking about the same thing when reading the comments on TechCrunch: there is a big following that would buy it in big part because it's from TechCrunch. Or let's say that, in all these cases, the blogs are used as a great advertising platform.

You can't blame them, building a following is hard work too.

Ah thanks. I was in the mindset of a hardware product.

Any blogger who has published a book of their "best" blog entries.

Not exactly in the tech product area, but Wil Wheaton has spun his relative fame from Star Trek into a widely read blog, and then a couple of books, and speaking appearances, and other writing for the LA Times, Suicide Girls, various comic books, etc.

Through is blog/twitter he's managed to associate himself with all things "geek" and found an audience who will buy his work.

many webcomics make money off t-shirts, books, etc etc with a similar model.

It's one thing to build a prototype.

It's an entirely different ballgame to put a prototype into production.

Someone has to print out boards, solder stuff on the boards, burn an OS on a drive, order parts from suppliers, and have a rigerous testing program.

Then you need to package up these puppies in pretty boxes and get them shipped out.

Oh, don't forget a crew of folks to man phones and deal with new orders and support issues. Don't forget the salespeople you'll need to get these into the hands of big suppliers.

Prototypes ain't hard. (More accurately: they tend to be inexpensive and you can fit everything you need into your two-car garage.) It's the business model that wraps around it that gets expensive and time-consuming.

Best of luck though to the crew. I like to see new competitors. It pushes everyone's game up.

While all this is true, the process of moving from a prototype into production is a more or less solved problem. For example, there are a lot of companies that one can outsource the actual pick-and-place, assembly and packing to. The same goes for support and sales, I'd imagine. If the VC money is in place, this part should just be turning the crank.

By your logic, you could have outsourced the design as well.

Design is less of a commodity.

More:

Documentation has to be written. Then there are legal fees, and perhaps an entire permanent legal department. Regulatory fees must be paid. Taxes must be paid. Tooling costs. Electricity costs. Insurance costs. Advertising costs.

It's not going to work. The major problem I see is that we only have two arms - if both are holding the device, how do you input data into it. If you drop it on the table, then it's flat on the table, which is also uncomfortable to enter data into. You want something that leans towards you.

What they need to do to make this work is:

1. Drop all the border around the touchscreen. Make the screen almost flush with the plastic around it

2. Use metal for the edges - like the macbook pro. Pay extreme attention to the external aesthetics

3. Make it smaller. One should be able to hold it comfortably with one hand and type with the other

4. Increase the size of the on-screen keyboard

1) I assume they can't get rid of the border because of the camera that comes with it.

3) If you read the article, it will be probably half as thick the final product - this is just a prototype which they left lots of room in it.

With the being flat on a table thing, what about the addition of foldable clips that would put it on an angle (like underneath your keyboard) - that would fix that problem.

It still does not solve the typing problem. You view the thing on an angle, but you want to type on a flat or slightly up tilted surface.

In the comments, Arrington mentions that the final product will ship with a stand, and also have a USB, earphones, and power port. I guess you could set it on the table, plug in a USB keyboard, and plug it into power. Then again, now it's a laptop.

You can solve the viewing angle problems without having to adjust the hardware too significantly - what about adjusting the perspective of the window that you're using depending on the angle that the thing is being viewed at.

For instance, if someone takes out both viewing angle clips, chances are it's sitting on a tabletop, so the screen could adjust accordingly so people aren't having to crane their necks to view the text accordingly.

Regarding 3 - why would you want to make it smaller? It can easily be held with 1 hand as they were doing in the demo. It weighs under 3lbs (maybe a couple oz' less when they make it smaller/remove stuff) - I can comfortably hold my MacBook Air with 1 hand while I type with the other and it weighs 3lbs.

How much input would you need? Aside from chatting, just having access to RSS and typing in Wikipedia entries would be enough.

I'd say about 30% of my interaction with the internet involves me sending data out. The other 70% is about reading stuff. The form factor of the tablet is not correct for reading, which is part of the point I'm trying to make. We have hundreds of years of experimentation with reading equipment, and there is a reason that books are a certain shape, size and for. It works. Why are they throwing all that out and coming up with a brand new form factor for something that is supposed to also be a reader?

They could split the keyboard in a way that would make it thumb-able.

Well, if they offer a small bluetooth keyboard as an accessory, then it would be okay.

I actually meant split the on-screen keyboard, with one half at either side of the screen where your thumbs would be.

Then you need a stand and a desk to use it. You'd be better off with a netbook/laptop.

I don't understand why people would want this over a netbook. Having a screen flat on your lap could make things pretty uncomfortable. Whilst holding it in one hand while you type with the other could be equally irritating.

Might be nice to mount on the wall though, for example in the kitchen so you can look up recipes while you cook.

Well, I'd be inclined to buy this kind of device for my grandmother.

Touch screens are intuitive for people who don't have a good grasp of technology, and combined with a decent homepage (perhaps a dumbed down google IG with large bookmark icons) she would get everything she needs.

Quite simply, it could be a great entry level product and useful for others who just want to check emails or other stuff while doing other stuff.

What would be great is if this was semi waterproof aswell with a stand for inclination - would be great to use in the kitchen while cooking.

And if it's in the kitchen and had an e-ink display, it could have a battery life of a year and I could stick it on my fridge to show me my Google calendar when it wasn't doing recipes.

Well I could be wrong but it looks like in one of those screenshots it has a USB port; what's stopping someone from just getting a keyboard and using it?

Yes, the prototype clearly has USB, ethernet, and VGA.

Realistically, though, why would anyone bother to plug a keyboard into this thing? Why wouldn't you just use your laptop or desktop?

That's cool if it has VGA I could charge it and then at same time have it connected to my LCD TV to watch Internet TV. Use wireless handheld mouse for remote.

I think VGA is only there for prototyping purposes. This tablet probably doesn't have the power to output a very good resolution or decode high quality video for your LCD TV. You're better off getting a cheap computer and sticking MythTV on it.

My Eee PC 701 outputs at full 1360 x 768 on my 720p LCD TV. I can't imagine this tablet having less "power" than the Eee PC 701.

On the other hand, I would be a little surprised if the final version did have VGA out.

How well does it decode video? It looks like your Eee has an integrated Intel GMA 900 GPU - what does the tablet have?

The MacBook Air can't even play HD video without stuttering. How does your Eee hold up?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=636511

No, Flash on a MacBook Air can't play HD without stuttering. Flash imposes an enormous processing overhead. The GPU doesn't even enter into it because Flash 9 does not have GPU-accelerated video decoding. The same h.264 stream plays fine in native players on systems half as powerful.

To answer your question, with my current config (Ubuntu Eee 8.04) standard def plays fine. HD from sites like vimeo definitely stutters. Youtube does some sort of resolution detection and always gives a "this video has been removed" error for HD since it thinks I'm running at 800x480, even when I'm outputing solely to an external monitor (and I am certain the video exists).

Arrington mentioned in the comments that the VGA was just for the prototype. Will be going away in the real version. The only ports will be 1 USB, headphones, and power.

How do you hook up the screen into a nice position? The reason laptops work well is because the screen can be positioned well.

Apparently you use legos to build a stand.

Or as non-Americans call it, "Lego"

</pedantic>

Arrington mentions in the comments that the lego stand was just for their temp use. The final product will ship with a stand.

> Because the device skips the resource-sucking parts of the operating system and focuses on one application - the browser - very low end hardware can be used and still give users a desktop-like Internet browsing experience.

I guess he never looks his Activity Monitor / Task Manager

I was thinking the same thing. I know firefox on vista can get up to 1Gb of ram without too much trouble. My understanding is that webkit is a little less resource hungry though.

The article also says, "The software: currently we’re running a full install of Ubuntu Linux on the prototype with a custom Webkit browser." Sounds as though they are needlessly limiting themselves in the marketing spiel.

You've got to love the LEGO stand they've made for it..

It doesn't look bad, but Asus will come with a new generation of their EEE netbooks this year, which could be folded to tablet pc with multitouch (Eee PC T91). So for a few more bucks I will get superset of Crunchpad with much more functions (normal netbook, keyboard, gps, tv receiver etc).

you will almost always get more for a few more bucks. the question is if you want/need more.

Didn't the original idea post mention that they will make the tablet open-source?

I'm sure Big Mike would have no problem going back on that if it looks like this thing could make a mint.

Your comment is nothing but an ad-hom. Do you have any evidence to support that he might?

For me, it all comes down to price. I think a lot of people might consider it if it costs 200$, whether they "need" it or not (cf. the netbook effect). For 300$ and above I'm not so shure.

I sure hope they don't call it the Techcrunch Tablet...talk about a crappy boring name. They need to call it Crunchpad...at least that has a cool sound, and has a hint of Apple like branding.

Hell you can see that it's a great name, because in the comments half the people are already calling it a Crunchpad.

If my damn iPhone would just get flash already, I wouldn't have much need for something like this.

They need to make sure they have a very low-power mode. When the tablet is placed in the stand, it should both charge as well as serve as a digital photo frame automatically.

Excellent. Another candidate to embed in my wall near light switches to control my X10 stuff.

I'm still rooting for the Picwing guys though.

It's a cool toy, but I really can't imagine how/where I would use it in-place of my laptop.

What are some use cases?

Give it a stand and use in the kitchen for recipes etc while cooking?

Perhaps as an entry level product for people who don't know how to use a mouse but might want to use the internet.

A basis for some kind of learning device for younger kids (if they get it more robust that is).

Seems like an expensive recipe catalog.

I don't think it's a very good idea to use electronics while you're cooking. Getting grease on anything that can't be scrubbed under running water is very irritating. There's a more durable solution to this: paper. You don't have to worry about washing your hands before touching it and if you splatter food on it then it's disposable.

I use my netbook for recipes all the time. It's on the bar, I don't keep it next to the fryer--no grease issues.

That said, I think the netbook works better than this tablet, it has a built-in stand and storage so I keep commonly used recipes on it. I have been baking quite a bit lately so recipes actually come in handy.

i think it will work (if not in this iteration then another), it does one thing, and hopefully well. it allows the owner to consume information. which is one of the main tenets of the internet.

this would be a killer device for university students aswell, i would love being able to carry this to class vs 4 different massive textbooks, and imagine how much more useful a chemistry/finance etc textbook would be if every page was interactive, imagine quick referencing and word definition

Everything you've described could be done with a standard laptop and you wouldn't need to make all the sacrifices.

It reminds me UMPC thing from MSFT, but cheaper.

I'd like to see this running android.

I like this one better:

http://www.ianmikutel.com/storage/CrunchPad.jpg