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.
Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.
If all you are doing is running Firefox and Skype, you don’t need a lot of hardware horsepower, which will keep the cost way down.
The idea is to turn it on, bypass any desktop interface, and go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device. Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc., and Skype for communication and you have a machine that will be almost as useful as a desktop but cheaper and more portable than any laptop or tablet PC.
It will also include a custom default home page with large buttons for bookmarked services - news, Meebo/Ebuddy for IM, Google Docs/Zoho for Office, Email, social networks, photo sites, YouTube, etc. Everything that you use every day.
We’re working with a supply chain management company that says the basic machine we’re looking to build can be created for just a few hundred dollars. They need us to write the software modifications to Linux and Firefox (more on that below) and spec the hardware. Then they run with it and can have a few prototypes built within a month.
What will we call it? The best name I can think of is the Firefox Tablet, but that will take a round of discussions with Mozilla.
Here’s The Plan
We’ll organize a small team of people to spec this out. First is the marketing document that just outlines what the machine will do - we have a first draft of that already and will post it soon. Then we’ll spec out the hardware and get people to help write the customized Linux and Firefox code. Once we’ve completed the design we’ll start to work with the supply chain company to get an idea on the cost of the machine (the goal is $200), and hopefully build a few prototypes. Anyone who contributes significantly to the project would get one of those first prototypes. If everything works well, we’d then open source the design and software and let anyone build one that wants to.
The goal is to keep the machine very simple and very cheap. I think this will be a lot of fun, and it may just turn into an actual product that we can use to surf the web and talk to our friends.
We’ll be coordinating the project over at TechCrunchIT. Leave a comment there if you want to participate and we’ll be in touch soon.
awesome idea.
Oh no!…. not Firefox!!! Opera-mini is a much better choice (there’s already 45 millions cellphone users across the globe). It’s WAY faster than Firefox and consumes much less RAM. Especially is you have only 500MB of RAM, Firefox is a terrible choice.
Do me a favor: opens 15 tabs in Firefox, with at least 5 of them with youtube pages. You will soon see RAM usage of FF climbing close to or above 600MB!!! While Opera will stick around 200MB.
It’s not FF doing that it’s Flash causing the spike in RAM use.
It would more than half a gig of ram IMHO.
i got firefox with 19 tabs open to use 200mb of ram with a couple plugins running whats ur problem ?
5 were youtube
others consisted of facebook myspace gmail logmein, wich uses a pane in the but proprietary hog pluggin and a bunch of other not google tabs, it ran stable at 208-211mb of ram mayb 2%cpu on vista premium, so i think it could easily work on linux
FF vs Opera: it’s a proven fact that Opera not only runs much faster than FF at launch (opens in 4 seconds with 5 tabs vs 9 seconds for FF with same tabs), just do the experiment before saying. Secondly, after thorough experiments, there’s no doubt Opera uses significantly less RAM than FF, on average 30-40% less. Google FF vs Opera and do a little research, or best, just try it.
And Opera has a built-in email client and a great feature: Tab Sessions. FF looks really retarded to me after only a month using Opera.
Are you sure you would use Opera Mini on a Tablet? I hope you were drunk when you wrote that, because I couldn’t take anything serious you said, especially your way wrong numbers (which can easily be checked without “researching” on Google).
Firefox is an absolute must for its Adblock.
Why is this man allowed to post comments?
Why don’t just install both? It’s not much of a space anyway.
Opera is not open source.
having a first-hand experience work with Opera in Nokia 770, I doubt it will be of any valuable effort from Opera side: they couldn’t care less about achievement, even when paid. And you will need ANY time you need to fix anything. If you want pull chains on yourself, don’t drag other into same moronity at its best.
Opera mini? Just because many phones have cripple-ware on them is no reason to try to ruin a new product.
Stick with something open-source as well.
19 tabs - 600MB = Absolutely non-sense xD
Ubuntu Linux, TVTime, PidGin, Eclipse and… 3 Firefox windows with 20 tabs each = 600MB, you fool xD
I’ve got 40 tabs open in Firefox 3, 10 are youtube videos. 300MB
MAYBE you should leave the decision of what browser to use for the user. Idiots.
If you build it, they will fap… But this is quite interesting, the principles are good. In the sense of open source Linux/ Firefox, Skype is free to use though (just not open source). I like the principles as they are not trying to build another laptop, they want a NETPAGE.
Not a bad name if I do say so myself… Or OPENPAGE…Tuesday 22nd July 08, SU Plus46.
The desired hardware shouldn’t need to be super fast, and running Linux can be striped down to be super lean. Great Job
Coupla things…..
1.) anyone who says handwriting recognition does not work has never used xp/vista tablet or any version of windows mobile since 2003 (my WM2003 pda is great), but better than that would be a grafitti style recognition, far easier to manage and train. I don’t really see the need if you are going to do an onscreen keyboard like the iphone, which works remarkably well, but hey, some folks want it.
2.) This has to have bluetooth, so that you can tether it to your cellphone for net connectivity on the go. This would be great for usb/bluetooth GPS units as well
3.) among included software, you need an ebook reader, and the ability to change the orientation of he screen. make sure it supports txt,html,pdf and mobipocket at minimum.
4.) an SD card slot (or even 2) would be great as well… run outta storage space, plop in an 8GB card, forget the other formats - too slow(xd), too power hungry (CF), too proprietary (Memory stick). If a cheap multireader can be had, thats fine, but SD is a definite.
5.) low end specs are fine, and the vast majority of the folks will likely use it exacly as intended, but this thing is a geeks wet dream, and they will play…if the cost can be reasonable, with a processor that can still handle full screen (at whatever resolution) mp4/divx/xvid/whatever playback, then great. A wireless, touchscreen device capable of playing media…. you’ll sell a million of them
6.) The interface must be dead simple to use, iPhone simple, get someone who knows what they are doing. I am a geek and proud of it, but geeks do not always make the best design decisions, they design the way they think and that is not the same way others do.
oh, and
7.) imitating apple’s UI is fine, imitating their earlier hardware (the sample picture of this thing looks like the candy imacs) is not so good. Nor is imitating Amazon’s Kindle. Look at Sony’s PRS-505. Very professional, and clean, remove some of the extraneous buttons and increase the screen size and its the perfect form factor for you, it even comes with a nice leather “cover” that closes magnetically over it to keep it protected. Make this something that someone older than 18 would not feel ashamed of carrying.
Spot-on comments; get all these features in this tablet, and I’ll be the first on the waiting list. Only revision I would suggest is that an SD slot is not quite necessary, if we’re sticking bare-minimum here– a USB SD-reader is what, 10$?
Also: a media player, maybe? I understand that with this little storage, most people will probably just use Pandora or access their music from the cloud & embedded web players, I’d appreciate something like Amarok on there just as an option.
I agree with your comments and would also add three essential elements:
1) Need a stylus with this for clicking on smaller items, plus a lot of people prefer a stylus
2) Need the ability to add software. It would be cool to have a desktop of sorts where you could have a 5-day forecast, but what would really be great is having VNC on the machine, so you could remote into your other computers, surf on them, kick off downloads, check your email, burn a DVD, etc.
3) Either have a dedicated right-click button for extra functionality or a button that simulates it. Right-click is one of those things that is always taken for granted and it’s sorely missed when you need it.
I would like to help on the project but I’m only 15 years old and i have some experience with computer but not a whole lot, but i would be glad to help the team with this project.
Great Idea.. I want to BUY one.
Please dont re invent the wheel, use google android software stack or ubuntu MID edition.
Great Idea. Read up on “Kiosk CD”, its a DSL based distro. All it is Firefox, its meant for kiosks. Modify that, and there you go;)
BTW, DSL is only 50MB.
I need one of these. I want to help develop it.
Bluetooth? A wireless keyboard would be nice to have.
its a good idea but i think it should run ubuntu or some other linux distro, not mac cuz i would want it to work
I don’t know if i’m too late to add toughs but here it goes.
More or less my ideal tablet pc:
The screen should be between 7″ to 10″ multytouch.
Intel atom processor.
Wireless network 802.11n.
Bluetooth.
The hdd could be SSD but the connection to the main
board should be standard so people could upgrade it
at will.
I think 1 slot for memory is enough up to 2gb ram.
A very good battery that last at least 5 to 7hrs of use.
The more important thing i will like to have if i build
my own tablet will be a vga input so i can use it as second monitor with my pc i think this is essential, i got a good idea as how this will work.
I think something else tablets really need is something to hold them at the back, it could be like a tennis ball so anybody can hold it and it could be use to keep it stand up right on top of a table or desk, probably with the battery inside too.
Defenetly Linux, don’t mind what software are included but i will just add XBMC on it…
This are basic things for my ideal tablet pc, i could add
more things i think is essential like GPS build in and a
slot to plug a SIM card so i could call SMS and connect online over mobile phone network and the good old web cam.
My talent is HR but sign me up for anything I can do!
Make it fold in half, so when it is carried, it doesn’t get scrathced
…but then you have a line in the middle of your reading plane when it’s open!?