I love to check my email in the morning, surf the newspapers a little, and catch up on the blogs. I usually do this over a cup of coffee and some toast for about the first 30 minutes each day. It’s my ritual.

Recently I started using an Acer AspireOne NetBook (as they are now called) to do this because, despite having a small screen, they turn on FAST, are small enough to balance on my knee, and bright enough to read clearly.

But, and the big but is this, they are still a traditional NOTEbook despite their small form factor, require a keyboard and mouse to operate, and are a pain in the butt if you want to get away from a notebook/desktop type setup even if only for breakfast.

Enter CrunchTablet (or dare I say, Crunchpad?)… a simple Tablet type device that would allow me to do pretty much all the things I now want to do over coffee, including surf, read email, and see the latest blog posts. Seems Michael Harrington is about to start selling them for a reasonable $300 per unit. Perhaps they’ll even be taking on the Kindles and Sony Readers of the world, too, as a platform for e-books and e-documents.