Digital Home Thoughts: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington Wants a $200 Web Tablet

"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."

Now this is something I'd pay $200 for! I'm baffled why someone hasn't created something like this already, but I was equally baffled as to why it took until last year for someone to build an affordable, small Web-focused computer like the Asus Eee PC. I've a firm believer in the concept of a low-cost, thin and light computer in every room - something that acts as a portal to your information. If this product materializes, it's a small step in the right direction. What would you like to see on this? I'd want to see an embedded version of VLC Media Player so it could handle all manner of video and audio files. A USB port would allow for a nice 8 GB USB flash drive for playing back video files off of, and I'd like to see it have an SD card slot for photo and video viewing (or more storage). What would you like to see this product have? Would you buy one for $200? $300?