For a brief second, I looked at this headline from Engadget and thought that Sony launched a new $199 web tablet to undercut the soon-to-be-(probably)-announced Apple Tablet. And then I looked closer and realized that Sony’s new Dash Internet Viewer is more of an HP DreamScreen competitor.

The Dash can be propped up like a photo frame or laid down flat. It apparently has some sort of battery, unlike the DreamScreen. But it’s not clear how long that battery lasts and whether the Sony Dash is meant for use outside of the home. Update: Nope, there’s no battery. The Dash needs to be plugged in to work.

The device has WiFi capabilities and a 7 inch touchscreen display. It runs a custom, widget-driven OS and it’s meant to work like an appliance, not a computer with a desktop operating system. Oh, and it will run Chumby widgets, which is pretty awesome, because there are more than a thousand already available including weather, news, music, video, game, social networking, and photo applications. Sony will also be making its own widgets available with access to things like Sony music videos and movie trailers.

The Dash can handle multitasking, which means you can listen to internet radio while looking at pictures or set your alarm clock to play an online video. There’s a USB port for connecting external devices and a headphone jack for not annoying the person sitting next to you.

The Dash will be available in April for $199. You can find more pictures after the break.

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Freescale Semiconductor is introducing a new reference design for a dirt cheap web tablet using an ARM Cortex A8-based processor and running Linux or Google Android. The company will be showing off a prototype at CES this week, and Freescale is looking for hardware partners to build actual products based on the reference design.

Freescale says the tablets can be built for as little as $140, allowing companies to sell the devices for up to $200 while still making a decent profit.

The ARM processor uses less than a quarter watt of power and features a total of 7 processor cores including a floating point processor for math, one for 2D graphics, another for 3D graphics, a third for 720P HD video decoding, and another for processing camera images.

Here’s what you get with the basic prototype:

• A 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel touchscreen display (single touch only)
• Less than 0.6 inches thick
• Weighs less than a pound
• 12 hour battery (1900mAh)
• 512MB of RAM
• Flash-based storage (4GB, 8G, or 16GB), plus an SD card slot for expansion
• Custom Linux and/or Android-based operating systems
• WiFi but and optional 3G (which would drive up the cost)
• 3MP webcam
• 3-axis accelerometer and ambient light sensor

Freescale says the target market for this tablet are young people between 15 and 25. These are users that are comfortable with on-screen and thumb keyboards and who don’t necessarily demand a full-sized 10-finger QWERTY keyboard which is hard to produce for devices with screens smaller than 10 inches.

Young people are also likely to balk at the idea of shelling out $60/month to connect yet another device to the internet. So rather than bundle the tablet with a 3G module and sell it through cellphone carriers, Freescale plans to make the base model a WiFi-only tablet that people can use around the house or at WiFi hotspots. In other words, you can think of this tablet as more of an oversized iPod Touch than an iPhone.

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Last week the folks at The Business Insider started predicting that Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad tablet was dead. Arrington hadn’t really spoken much about the tablet since this summer, and the Business Insider heard rumors that the rising costs of production were delaying and possibly putting an end to the tablet.

Apparently the reports of the CrunchPad’s death are a bit premature. In this week’s Gillmor Gang video, Arrington says that the CrunchPad is coming along and that it will sell for somewhere between $300 and $400. He says it costs somewhere in the “upper $200s” to build, and that he’s looking at ways to help keep costs down with sponsorship opportunities, sort of the way Firefox makes money for Mozilla through the search box with Google set as the default search engine. Hopefully Arrington is talking about similarly unobtrusive sponsorship.

While the project apparently isn’t dead, I do still think there’s a chance it will be DOA. Arrington says that the CrunchPad, which will feature a 12 inch display and an Intel Atom processor, and a browser will be designed to handle Hulu, YouTube, Gmail, and other web apps. And that’s about it. For $99, I think that would be an awesome device. For $300 to $400 I don’t really see why anyone would buy a dedicated web device instead of a fully functional computer. By the time the CrunchPad is available, you might even be able to pick up a touchscreen tablet style netbook in the $400 range. You can already get the Eee PC T91/T91MT for around $500 to $550.

But Arrington predicts that within a few years web tablets will be just as big as netbooks, with 10s of millions having been sold. It’s not entirely clear whether he’s talking about the CrunchPad alone, or other similar products. He does say that he’s not too concerned about competition from the upcoming Apple Tablet, which he expects to have a smaller screen, but to be significantly more powerful than the CrunchPad while costing 2-3 times as much.

While I’m skeptical that there’s a huge market for web tablets, Arrington does know a thing or two about entrepreneurship. He does run one of the most popular tech blogs on the internet, and blogging is a business he didn’t know much about before he started doing it either. Why not consumer electronics?

You can check out the CrunchPad section of the Gillmor Gang video at about 39 minutes into the video.

via UMPC Portal