Photos of the upcoming CrunchPad from the folks over at TechCrunch were accidentally published on the internet last week.  TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington acknowledged the photos with a post here.

The virtual keyboard on the CrunchPad

If you haven’t heard of it, the goal of the CrunchPad project is to build a $200-$300 tablet device for internet browsing and some multimedia usage.  The device would be thin, boot directly into a browser, use minimalist hardware, and would use a virtual, rather than physical, keyboard.  TechCrunch’s original post announcing the project is here.

The prototypes look pretty good, but it will be interesting to see how well a simple tablet for browsing will do with netbook prices falling within the same price range.