According to InformationWeek, TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington has incorporated a company in Singapore to manufacture and sell his CrunchPad Tablet device, which may be ready for imminent arrival to market. The thin, touchscreen device will have a 12-inch diagonal screen, and on-screen keyboard, and will perform all the usual netbooky functions -- email, Web browsing, video-watching courtesy of Flash -- in a smaller, thinner form factor than the market's current offerings. Several sources [2] have reported that the tablet will be announced officially as soon as this month. (A mockup of the finished device, seen below.)

[3]

Already leaked in its prototype digs [4] in April, the CrunchPad will run a customized Linux-based OS that boots directly into its browser, allowing the device to perform as a kind of thin client to the morass of cloud-based services we've come to know and love. The CrunchPad will run an Intel Atom processor (likely the 1.6GHz flavor popular in netbooks) and a substantial 4GB of RAM.

The $300 machine will fill a hole in the mobile market that Arrington has been decrying now for a year on his blog; no one, he says, has produced a simple, cheap Web tablet that is fast and usable. InformationWeek says that Arrington may find himself going up against Apple, which has been rumored to be working on a similar gizmo, but the veracity of that rumor is dubious; it's probably based upon this off-hand comment [5] by Apple's interim CEO Tim Cook at April's earnings report event, in which Cook intimates that Apple is "looking at" the netbook space.

Check out video below of the CrunchPad Prototype #B1 in action.