How much money would it take to get into hardware?
brk: A lot of it depends on the hardware you're going to use.  Assembling a bunch of off-the-shelf components into a new idea (ref: Chumby) is going to be much cheaper than developing your own custom asic's (ref: SiCortex).My experience over the course of a couple of hardware startups doing more off-the-shelf approach is it would take you about $20-$35MM in total funding for a typical hardware startup doing something semi new/radical.The hardware design itself can actually be relatively cheap.  Packaging (custom tooling for cases, etc.) can easily cost you $20K-$300K (ie: as much as a big Angel round for some software startups).  Manufacturing costs are usually a function of volume commitments and timing.  So, you are going to be incented to commit to larger manufacturing runs than you are comfortable with to keep the per-unit cost low.  Inevitably, after you do this you find there is some trivial but important item you missed, so you end up with re-work costs, or if you're very unlucky a lot of scrapped inventory.To answer your Tablet PC question, my guess is that you're looking at $10M.  There is not a lot of invention there.  You'd pull together a lot of off-the-shelf components into a new form factor.  Most of your early costs would be sucked up by the design and tooling of the casing and overall industrial design.  I'd venture that you'd be $500K into it just for ID and an ME to layout the (presumably) injection molding designs for the case and first mold.  Budget another $150K ish for UL and FCC certs (your outsourced factory can help you with a lot of this process).  Then you're likely to go through probably $250K in the initial hardware designs and single-unit prototypes.  You'll generally need or want 1 prototype for each developer (probably 5-8 in this case), plus another 6-12 for QA, and another dozen or so for demos and for employees to carry around and just "use" out in the wild.  If you're making a tablet with an $800 price point, your production BOM is going to be around $200, and total manufacturing costs around $350ish, but your first prototypes will cost you $1000ish/ea at first because a lot of it will be work done by hand, etc.So, thinking purely off the top of my head, you'd probably take a $1M angel round, a $4M A round and a $5M B round.  Since this is a semi-proven CE device and not something radically new, you just need to build it and get it out there, not convince the world why they need it.