Following our suggestion to develop our own device for next year’s conference, we have been receiving quite a bit of feedback. Most people who know a thing or two about hardware design are essentially telling us that we are a bit crazy, and should modify an existing design, instead of trying to build one from scratch. But some folks who understand what we are trying to achieve and have done it before have already started to work on possible scenarios. There is not much we can share at this point, but things are encouraging enough to keep the dream alive. In the meantime, we’re trying to refine our thinking about the device’s overall form factor.

One of the first things industrial designers do when starting to work on a new concept is to pull existing devices, play with them, and tear them apart to see how they have been put together. We’re just amateurs in the field, but we happen to have a couple of gadgets on our desks or in our drawers, and we gathered some of them yesterday, trying to better understand what the ideal size for our Mini Tablet should be.

After less than five minutes of tossing our favorite gizmos around, one thing became obviously clear: the form factor for what we want to build is amazingly close to the one adopted for the Sony Reader, down to the exact connectors and ports.

Being 6.9" tall, 4.9" wide and 0.5" thick, it’s perfectly sized: large enough to provide a 6" display that will nicely display most web pages. And weighting only 9oz, it’s light enough to be carried around easily. In terms of controls, there are lots of buttons we don’t need, but removing them would only make the Reader’s already clean curves even cleaner. And with respect to connectors and ports, the only change we would make would be to use a magnetic connector for the dock, and to add one for landscape docking (only portrait docking is supported today).

If we were to adopt this form factor for our device, we would keep the exact same screen size, but move it to the center, making it easier to hold the device in landscape mode with two hands. We would also replace all the buttons that are currently located on the top of the Sony Reader by a single ‘Home’ button. We would also refrain ourselves from showing any logo on the top of the device, making it look good when docked in either landscape or portrait mode.

So let’s assume that such a form factor would work from a usability standpoint. The next question then becomes: is it technically feasible? Can we get enough processing power and battery life to make it work? To answer these questions, we need to learn more about the hardware and software that are powering the Sony Reader today. And as much as we like tearing gadgets apart, putting them back together is nowhere near as fun, so we’d rather leave that to someone else. This is where MobileRead came to the rescue, with a very detailed review of the Sony Reader.

There, we learned that the Sony Reader is running MontaVista Hard Hat Linux on a Motorola DragonBall MXL CPU. This CPU runs at 200 MHz and has been paired with displays showing 320 x 480 pixels with 65,000+ colors, which is what you get on an iPhone. Of course, we need a much bigger screen (6" instead of 3.5"), better resolution (at least 800 x 600), and a slightly faster CPU that will make your average AJAX application fast enough not to drive the user running for her laptop.

So where does this leave us? Well, we have a good form factor candidate, and we know that we can run Linux on it. What we do not know yet is whether we can find a large enough multi-touch screen, whether we can get a fast enough CPU to run a full-fledge web browser (think Firefox with Flash), and whether the addition of WiFi and Bluetooth would require significant changes to be made to the design. Answers coming soon…