So the guys at TechCrunch have been making significant progress on their attempt to build a $200-300 touch screen web tablet. It’s still a prototype, but the specs are pretty impressive: 12″ touch screen, camera, 1GB Ram, 4GB flash drive. While it’s great to see this type of project moving forward, the bigger story is that a $300 web tablet is now economically feasible. And when Apple leverages its enormous user base, software, and manufacturing assets to build it, it could be a killer app.
While netbooks are all the rage these days, Michael Arrington hit the nail on head when he wrote:
When you ditch the operating system and all it’s weight and focus on a device that runs a browser only (a true netbook), you can make do with mobile phone level hardware. Give people a big screen to really experience the Internet. Make it a touch screen or add a normal keyboard. And keep it really inexpensive. That’s a device people will want.
I couldn’t agree more. I consistently see people forgoing their laptops and desktops for quick web access on their iPhones. The only limitation being that the screen is too small for common usage. At $200-$300, an iPod tablet would be affordable enough for people to buy in addition to their laptop and iPhone. It would be the perfect casual browsing platform. Combined with a camera and the full iPhone application platform, the device would also be a great game, communication, and entertainment platform.
In fact there are a variety of new uses for this type of device as well, including one that most people tend to overlook: reading. While the Kindle has gotten all the attention in the e-book space, just about everyone I know that has an iPhone and reads books, is starting to do so on their Stanza equipped iPhone. Shawn wrote some very interesting comments on this a while back. The reality, though, is that as great a platform as the iPhone/iPod is, adding a bigger screen to the mix would still radically improve the experience.
At the end of the day, given Apple’s ability to reap subsidies from wireless carriers and eek out every last cent of profit from manufacturing, it’s only a matter of time until they make $300-$500 iPod tablet. While the Kindle and netbooks are hot sellers at at this price point, neither will be able to compete with a similarly priced iPod tablet.
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