Update on the TechCrunch Tablet: A humble (and messy) beginning. Prototype A has been built. It’s in a temporary aluminum case that a local sheet metal shop put together for us that’s at least twice as thick as it needs to be, but the hardware has been defined and is nearing lockdown. We booted the machine in the case for the first time today, accessed the Wifi network and were able to navigate a web page via the touch screen.
Most of the work is transitioning to software and UI, and real industrial design work on the case is beginning.
We are still far from having beta units but there is now a team working on the project, and an incredible group of people and companies have reached out to us to help. We’ve learned a lot about building a hardware device over the last few weeks, and it’s clear that it is quite possible to build a high performance web tablet in the price range we anticipated.
A teaser picture:
When do you expect it to be on the market?
First question would be when can we see a live working video rather a aluminium case? We do understand that it does take time working on something which is new and that too within a messed up room
May be you should post a Beta Launch Date!
I think we expect too much …. people are building this device scratch they need time and some money to demo the product. Lets give them..and i will say cheers to these guys..good work…
This thing is powered by redbull and HENNNNDRICKSOOOON!
Right as TechCrunch gets nailed for violating the 110 patents necessary to construct and use this thing. I love the passion, but this is a train wreck waiting to happen.
and so you decided to offer your patent knowledge necessary to construct and use this thing? Also, it might help conversation if you specify what problems x 110 you have in mind.
Bravo and good luck.
I’m following this project with great interest.
You need a project page though, with a timeline, and lot’s and lot’s of transparency around the various design decisions you have made and the toughies you’ll have to make.
I second this.
I second this.
what is this for ? cant you just buy one can some one informe me what this all about?
Jason
Chicago IL
You can buy a Nokia Internet Tablet 810 – but Techcrunch wants the screen to be bigger and wants the device to be cheaper. As someone else commented – If a company like Nokia and its economy of scale can’t make the device for borscht cheap I don’t see how Techcrunch can – but more power to them if they can! I’d buy one – I bought a N810.
Cheers
great to see your branching out into tangible products.
Way to go. The project is alive after all. What are the hardware specs you have defined for the first beta?.. Is the project going to have a dedicated website?. Looks interesting.
we’ll talk about the hardware once it’s nailed down, there are a couple of moving pieces.
I could save you a lot of time on building the hardware by just sending you my NEC VERSA LitePad that I picked up during my time at a starup back in 2003. It only has a Pentium III 933 MHz processor and 240MB of RAM, but it also has 3 USB ports, built-in WiFi, built-in speaker and mic, external speaker and mic connections, supports an external keyboard, mouse and monitor, a enthernet connection, etc. The footprint is a little larger than 8.5″ x 11″, but less than 1″ thick. If your interested, you can pick it up for a decent price.
Wow, I thought this project was abandoned. Quite surprised to see a prototype has already been built.
I’d love to help out when it comes to beta testing — keep me posted!
does it actually work, or did just put a notebook in a pizza box and cut out a hole for the screen?
it works, but there is a lot of software work that needs to be done.
wow, great work guys – can’t wait to see the next prototype!
You’re cramming so much into such a small form factor. It really should be called “Crunch” when you go to production.
I second that; it should be called “Crunch” and nothing else! But isn’t Nokia N800 something similar? It’s below $250 right now. Anyway, I personally like Nokia’s N810 more as it has a slide-out keyboard. They also have a WiMAX version, but it will be useful in the States hopefully next year.
I know Mike is not a fan of Nokia, but their Internet Tablets are really good and their Maemo is one of the reasons for that and it has a very active and strong community behind it.
Nokia tablets were same size when they were in “fetus mode” – until true proto went into beta level. But Nokia has had different pocket, different target, and it was only first few steps on the way. Mike executes totally different strategy, so I wish him good luck, he will need it – granted what I see as hardware on photo, it is very *garage* level.
Wow amazing, is it a mutli-touch type tablet or a pen on plastic type tablet?
Thanks for the update on this project, I will also like to know if there’s (or will be) a dedicated website for this.
Hope to buy something soon!
Mike,
That is awesome. Sometimes it take someone like you that really does not understand the “perceived” limitations to push the envelope of what is possible.
I mean this as the highest possible compliment. Keep Creating!
yeah I agree. So many meetings where hardware people kept saying it couldn’t be done anywhere near the price point. But when they finally get that it doesn’t need to run a full OS and does just one thing (surf the web), they start to understand.
Reminds me of Henry Ford and his V8 engine. His engineers kept saying it can’t be done but he kept telling them to do it. Eventually they did do it. Sometimes you just have to wait for the technology to catch up with your ideas.
Mike, your HW guys are same as everywhere – they try to get more during budgeting, lol… And to me, they can do full system much better on same form-scale factor — you have plenty of space (compared to what we had in 770/N8X0 tablets), essentially the place for battery power, so you gotta kick those boys, they can do it
Up until now that has indeed been impossible. There wasnt an ARM core out there that was powerful enough and X86 solutions were too expensive, big and hot.
An 800Mhz Atom or, more likely, a Cortex A8-based platform like the ti3430 is what youll need to be competitive with procesing power, battery life and size. The Pandora project has already got hardware ready, this could easily be tabletised so have a word with them, it could save you tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of dev dollars.
P.S. I looked into a project like this myself earlier this year. It nearly happened too apart from last minute hardware availability problems. It was going to be called the Carrypad!
Steve
(UMPCPortal)
Is $200 the target price to sell it, or to build it?
we’re still working on that.
Morphix looks like the likely distro, right? Their kiosk just runs Firefox, just add Flash and Java to it.
Given the hackable nature of it you could place the web browser, Skype, some emulation and DooM.
What kind of software do you plan to put on it? I am willing to write a couple of apps if you guys need.
a browser and enough of an OS to launch a browser.
Isn’t enough OS to launch Mozilla and potential plugins that are supported on Linux. I mean you can’t watch CNN live without installing a plugin…
will it come in pink? …i’m serious.
yes, even if i have to hand paint one for you myself.
Aw, Mike, you know it’s not that hard, but I love your enthusiasm. Speaking of which, did you ever get that red Chumby you were promised?
pink computer {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/CS9jTrdYna_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”pink computer ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/rztrZ05w0v”}}}
Excuse me for asking, but are you high?
Hi Mike,
It would be cool, if you post a video of the working so far
Relax, all right? My old man is a television repairman, he’s got this ultimate set of tools. I can fix it.
Software-wise, are you guys using Moblin stuff? (http://moblin.org/) If you are using an LPIA (low powered Intel architecture) cpu, Ubuntu has an OS with a lot of touch-screen friendly out-of-the-box apps already. And yes, Moblin is moving to Fedora, but I’d personally go with Ubuntu over Fedora any day for ease of end-user experience
Amazing. Way to go.
I see some empty redbull cans… how many where budgeted for the prototype?
many.
This is incredible, I definitely want to have/buy one whenever it’s available for beta testing/sale. If you ever want to test it on a university campus, I know Cameron could do Stanford, but I’d love to help!
Glad to see you guys are organized. Goodness.
I think this tablet will be cost about $400
April fools. Oh, I mean August fools.
http://digg.com...let_Prototype_A
Maybe a grayscale screen would save on power-consumption with an optional backlight (like casio indiglo). How much of the web really needs to be in color? e-ink? whatever that is.
Mike,
An idea which perhaps you have considered (or perhaps not) – have you thought about having a rolling release of the product with a variable pricing & some special features for the first buyers?
i.e. let’s say the target price is about $200 (or so) a unit – have you thought about a pre-sales price of a bit more for the buyers of the first sets of units (say 100 or if the demand is there 1000) at a higher price ($500 perhaps) which would come with extra features
- engraved case
- numbered (so might sell the low numbers for even higher – the first for example perhaps at an auction)
- perhaps a promise of an upgrade (including of the hardware) as major bugs are quashed
the main idea being to think of the first batch as not mass production pieces (which will come later perhaps) but as boutique, bespoke type products – and overcharge people for the privilege of being the first owners (and the bonus of cool/special art, limited editions, numbered copies, special recognition for the first batch of owners etc.)
I’d imagine there are any number of web geek friendly artists who might also do artist’s editions (XKCD web tablets anyone? Hugh McLeod tablets? etc)
Anyway just a thought – very glad to hear about the progress, looking forward to the next updates!
Shannon
great ideas. also, we wouldn’t release any devices without final hardware, and the software can of course be updated.
nope…bad ideas…come on…lets spare the marketing guys talk for later. Am sure there are 100 things like this that can be done…but its not important…just focus on building a good product…
here you are doing just right – HW variants are expensive even where buyer can manipulate OEM factory, and you essentially don’t order millions of _other_ devices from them, so you can’t make cheap variants. just do ONE CORRECT FINAL HW RELEASE, SW can be updated later.
@shannonclark nice thinking, something of the idea of http://www.onet...ndpaintings.com
Cheers for that.
Looks pretty awesome. I’m excited to see it in action and I’d love to know if you have a ballpark date that you are shooting for in regards to when you expect it to ship (obviously you don’t have a launch date but you must at least have a time period you are shooting for).
How about the patent for a “supersized iPod Touch” (understand large touchscreen tablet) that Apple has filed? That was reported earlier this week.
Kudos to Nik and the rest of the team. It is good to see that a lot of the sleep deprivation is starting to materialize. Was the firefox vs. webkit decision made already?
Or maybe google’s Chrome !!??
Please make it look good and don’t print anything on the front. I prefer good looks over performance and features.
Print “Don’t Panic ” on the front.
What’s wrong, cant afford a decent workbench?
I want buy your super product in TESCO!
Has this morphed into a commercial effort? I though the goal was to create a working model and make the tech publicly available via open source. I know you are fronting the build, but it would be very disappointing if you decided to neg on your initial promise. I encourage you to sell pre-built models, but for those of us who can handle our own, you promised open source and that is what you should deliver.
Why couldn’t it be a commercial open source effort?
Commerical open source is fine…
So where is the openness? We’ve got a photo of a block of aluminum with a screen in it, on a workbench… and … that’s it. Where’s the project page? The wiki? The mailing list? The prototype design specs?
How is this “open” exactly?
What a messy place! When Google started, the place was as messy as that with many servers.
http://www.KidT...ru.blogspot.com
AWESOME, Mike. I hope you can make money out of this. It is always great to see seomthing that CREATES a new space, instead of just another me-too POS. I hope it can also read ebooks, perhaps through the flash plugin in firefox. As far as the distro, I would be going Moblin. Are you looking for funding?
is the development site still private. can we be given access.
amazing work so far, keep up the speedy development
mark
soon. we’re limiting the number of cooks in the kitchen for now.
Mike,
Since this all started by taking the idea to the community and getting feedback and volunteers, it would be great if you could document the lessons learnt in building a new device, the things that were involved, matters that are critical, etc.,
Thanks,
Vinuth.
soon.
Uhm…
FAIL
yeah? show us what you’ve ever created asshole.
Well, I was drunk when I posted that, so it was a little bit condensed, let me elaborate:
How many music critics ever put out a good album?
Some people create things, others just talk about them…
And seriously, who do you know that publicly discussed issues related to what the prototype will do and the final product will do? It’s like this is the first thing they’ve ever made. Duh, you don’t TALK about things that you’re working on you just MAKE the things you’re working on… and when you do talk about it, you don’t talk about what it WILL do but what it DOES!
Also, when you’re making something, the first dozen or so things that you produce will probably not be that good, because that’s a huge part of the creative process, learning from your failures. Typically, you don’t want to be very public while you’re just starting out, because you’d rather get it right before you told the entire world… that way, nobody sees the malformed ideas and duct-taped together prototypes, they just think this thing you made popped out of nowhere! “What a genius!”
So, they’ll most likely get this touch-screen thing all wrong, and if they really are creative types, they’ll shrug their shoulders and just keep making stuff… if not, and they’re crushed that their first creation was a failure, they’ll go back to criticizing what other people make.
And really, David, do you think I’d get in to a pissing contest about what I’ve made with someone on the Internet? We can compare dick size the next time I’m in NY…
What are you using for the screen?
prototype a has a 12 inch screen. the final will have either a 10 or 12. Lots of issues come into the decision on that beyond cost. resolution has to be at least 1024.
Have you considered trying to get the OLPC outside readable screen? High res and cheaper than most other screens. PixelQi is pushing the screen into a touch screen realm, so maybe contact them and see what they say.
PixelQi will sell the original OLPC screen very cheaply but their next-gen touchscreen isn’t for sale yet.
Michael,
I think this is a pretty fascinating idea; finally, an outside observer decides to get their hands dirty in the gadget space…
I’d love to see complete transparency on how much it’s costing, both in real and “volunteer/contributed” dollars to develop the unit, entirely. There are significant barriers to entry with breaking into hardware, least among them cost management, so it’d be interesting to see what you’re having to spend to push this kind of plan forward and make your own device a reality.
Cheers,
–Chris Cardinal
yeah, eventually we’ll discuss all of that.
Mike,
Did you open a Macbook Air for this?
Best of Luck, Keep up the good work.
waiting to see a prototype video of your tablet pc mike!
Good Job!
I want one right now. Are you going to sell the prototype on ebay?
Agreed. Want. Now.
Another case where anything is..truly possible.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to make a simple cad model for the prototype hardware.
http://tctablet...tronix.se/#2.11
I would like to finish the work but since last week I have not been able to to get in touch with them on either irc or skype… :/
Woa thats looking awesome. What browser would it be running, firefox? Also, is it likely to have inputs, like a usb or a headphone port?
Seriously though, as soon as you guys need beta testers I am your man. Congrats; way to use the blog for something that could reach beyond the tech business reporting niche.
So you mean you want a free tablet?