Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch is sick of waiting for an affordable and simple tablet.

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.

I don’t know why I was a little shocked to see the post today when I’ve been a fan of Arrington for a while now. I guess that’s what makes the dude smart. This is a classic example of the “See a hole, fill it” philosophy. Instead of waiting for Apple or someone else to make one, do it yourself or better yet – get someone else to do it for you. Just reading through the comments, you will see a lot of supporters willing to contribute to this project. The power of crowdsourcing.

On a personal note, I’ve also been waiting for something like this for the past 2 years. If the iPhone was only bigger. I have an HP Pavillion tablet that works great but even though it’s small, it’s still not very portable or sexy. I want something that I can take to work and take care of business during lunch time or on the train commute home. If this project see’s the light of day, I might be building my 1st computer.