Michael Arrington Wants Help Designing a US$200 Open Source Internet Tablet

Michael Arrington wants a US$200 touchscreen internet tablet. So do a lot of people. Unlike a lot of people, Arrington is loaded and runs TechCrunch. So he’s taking it into his own hands and putting out a call for people to help him design a cheapo open source touchscreen tablet that would launch right into Firefox. Nothing fancy, just something to let you surf the web while you’re sitting on the can.

Here’s the basic idea:

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.

He’s looking for people to help spec out the hardware and write the custom Firefox and Linux code for it. If you help, you’ll be handsomely rewarded with a first-run edition of the to-be-named device if and when it ever becomes a reality.

Will it actually happen? I’m not sure, but it sounds pretty good to me. We’ll see. [CrunchGear]