After months of delays and radio silence, web 2.0 cheerleader and temperamental blogger Michael Arrington has declared his inexpensive web tablet project CrunchPad dead.
Arrington announced the end of the CrunchPad on Monday through a blog post that laid the blame on his development partner, Singapore-based company Fusion Garage.
“The entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication,” he wrote on his blog.
Arrington says Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan “based on pressure from his shareholders had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.”
“I’m enraged, embarrassed, and just sad,” Arrington wrote. “The CrunchPad is now in the deadpool.”
Neither TechCrunch nor Fusion Garage own the intellectual property of the CrunchPad “outright,” claims Arrington. A team from both companies worked together on the project and they allegedly shared development expenses. Arrington says the two companies jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, while TechCrunch solely owns the CrunchPad trademark.
Fusion Garage did not return an e-mail request for comment.
Arrington first floated the idea of a tablet in June last year. He talked of a touchscreen device that would run Firefox and Skype on top of a Linux kernel. The tablet would have low-end hardware — a power button, a headphone jack, speakers, a microphone and a built-in camera for video. It would come with Wi-Fi, 512 MB of memory, a 4-GB solid-state hard drive and no keyboard. All this for $200.
The idea seemed promising, especially because other major PC makers including Apple and Dell are reportedly working on tablets due for launch next year.
Critics, however, pointed out that for CrunchPad delivering those features at the promised price and within the scheduled time frame would be a challenge. Production costs and a challenging retail environment would eat into profit margins, they said.
CrunchPad never moved beyond the vaporware category. Even a prototype version of the device was not shown publicly. But that didn’t deter some industry watchers from hailing it as the next ‘it’ product. Last month, Popular Mechanics named the CrunchPad to its “ten most brilliant products of 2009″ list.
In his blog note, Arrington says the CrunchPad was ready for a public launch in two weeks. The “plan” was to show it at his Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, he says.
“We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want,” he wrote. “We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.”
His team had reportedly been able to get the CrunchPad to around a $300 price point for larger distribution.
Arrington makes a few other eyebrow-raising claims. He says a “major multi-billion dollar retail partner has been patiently working with us for months, giving advice on manufacturing partners and offering to sell the CrunchPad at a zero margin to help us succeed in the early days.”
“They were even willing to fly the devices from China on their own planes to eliminate our shipping costs,” he wrote.
As for financing, if Arrington is to be believed, venture capitalists and angel investors have been beating down his door since spring to invest money in the project.
But take all of this with a big grain of salt. Arrington’s earlier promises regarding the CrunchPad never panned out, and his latest missive only points to his inability to walk the talk.
See Also:
Photo: CrunchPad Tablet/Techcrunch
Hexxeh’s Chrome OS build, Dev hardware list | Email this | Comments
Some people are just discovering vinyl records, causing them to make a comeback. Some people never threw their old vinyl out. Helping both audiences is the 
