The fine people at a computer geek blog want to built a tablet computer:

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 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.

[... blah blah blah ...]

We’ll organize a small team of people to spec this out … 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.

See that part I’ve emphasized where they say their goal is to make their retarded, deformed iPod Touch/Dell love child cost $200? As a hardware designer who has actually designed stuff that’s, you know, real, I have one thing to say to that.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!