(Updates with Arrington post on the Crunchpad)

Quixotic Web 2.0 personality Michael Arrington has been on a quiet quest for the past few months to create an inexpensive web tablet.

Now photos of the device, called Crunchpad, have leaked online. Dustin Curtis, a user interface designer, posted four photos of a sweet-looking machine that could potentially compete with netbooks.

Arrington first wrote about the idea of a tablet in June last year. He suggested a touchscreen device that would run Firefox and maybe Skype on top of a

Linux kernel.

"The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone," wrote Arrington. The Crunchpad would also have Wi-Fi, 512 MB of memory, 4 GB solid state hard drive and no keyboard.

The latest photos of the Crunchpad show that Arrington and his team may be getting closer to a finished product. The candy-colored packaging and the Apple-like rounded edges design should be enough to draw in users. Add to that the $200 price tag — if they can stick to it — and it could seal the deal for many users.

Arrington has said he ultimately wants to make the specs available under an open source license so other manufacturers can build on it.

In a post on Techcrunch Arrington said the initiative was often called "Mike's Science Project," that the device "can be built for less than $250" and described some of the specs:

The last version had a full install of Ubuntu Linux with a custom

Webkit browser. This version has a bottom-up linux operating system and a new version of the browser. We also switched from Via to the Intel

Atom chip. The total software footprint is around 100 MB total, which is a solid achievement.

Arrington did not say where in the lifecycle the project is now.

The fact that a Web 2.0 media mogul can turn into a hardware entrepreneur in mere months confirms that the time is ripe for hardware startups, as Wired.com reported recently. The combination of easily outsourced industrial design, overseas manufacturing and accessible online distribution means that it costs surprisingly little to create a new hardware product than it did before.

Meanwhile, as with most things Arrington-related, the latest leaked photos come with their share of drama. The photos were posted to Curtis' blog, then taken down briefly — ostensibly at Arrington's request — and are back online now. In any case we have saved them for your fill of crunchy product. Several more on on Techcrunch.

Read on for more photos of Crunchpad.