I recently discovered the existence of an an open source, crowdsourcing hardware and software project for designing, building and marketing a lowcost Web tablet computer from the guys of the Techcrunch blog.

I rather agree with their original point of view: iPhone is nice but too small, most laptops are over-powered for the task” and (this is mine): netbooks are just underpowered, tiny toys almost unusable even for the web, so why don’t create a light weight, multitouch, low cost screen to surf the internets? A tablet which would be open source from top to bottom, converting or adapting minimal Linux or BSD distros, and including cost limited hardware open source multitouch display.

tablet pc techcrunch

I’m however actually skeptical on the ultimame feasability of the operation, considering that are still no known financial resources, no market target studies, uncertain design lines (including a Macbook Air tablet mockup) just lots of comments and a huge utopia from top to bottom.

I will copy&paste one comment from the reader Chris Sears on the techcrunch page to explain the ardous possibility for this thing to see the light:

- No open source hardware project has really taken off
- Crowdsourcing doesn’t work that well
- Major companies have no doubt considered making such a product and haven’t for some probably good reason
- There’s a lot more to delivering a product to market than just getting it spec’d out and manufactured
- Once Mike has one, what reason do you have to continue with the project?
- You’re effectively taking on the iPhone, the EeePC, Nokia tablets, OLPC, and the UMPCs for hardware and OpenMoko, Android, Palm OS and others on software
- You’re a blog

“You’re a blog” is in fact strikingly ironic, summing up the distrust one can have for people who use to write about rather than realize things…

I’m curious to see if this project will go through all this. In the best of all possible worlds I’m probably buying it, unless if they will call it the “iTablet”.