Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Wi-Fi connected touchscreen tablets are finally getting closer to the real thing.  Testing out the unproven market niche, two players are getting closer to coming to market from two unlikely sources.  Big manufacturers like Apple, Asus, and others have trouble seeing how this market will differentiate itself from a netbook and continue to wait on the sideline.

A touchscreen tablet, as currently defined is basically a netbook with no physical keyboard.  The operating system has been slimmed down to just a web browser as the primary functions are surfing the web and web applications.  The device is meant to be used at home as the ultimate couch computing device.

One potential offering is a 12” touchscreen tablet born out of frustration by the tech blog Techcrunch.  Realizing the market was not serving this niche, combined with the knowledge that among its readers they had the know-how to build a device, the Crunchpad was developed.  Now in its second prototype, the device actually looks pretty good.  While not a slim as many would hope or as cheap (headed to $300 retail), the device seems to work.

The second, and perhaps more promising is a 7” tablet from a new player in the space, GiiNii.  The Movit Maxx is the larger of two siblings that runs on the Android OS, the smaller has the same feature set but only a 4.3” screen (more like the iPod touch). A webcam also makes it into the feature spec.

GiiNii up till now was a small HDTV, camera, video camera, and picture frame specialist.  They have retail distribution deals with Target, Wal-Mart, Amazon, and Walgreens.  Will they pick up this variation on the theme?  The company hasn’t named pricing yet, but I was told, “it will be way less” than the iPod touch, so expectations on the 7” put it in the very affordable range.  GiiNii says they will know for sure in late summer of this year when the 7” is available.

I use my iPod touch for this purpose.  I am not sure if a bigger screen would motivate me to buy this with limited functionality over pocket-ability.  Which will rule the day when these are released?  My money is still on pocket-ability but I hope I am wrong because this concept intrigues me.

Product pages: [GiiNii] and [TechCrunch]