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:

• Calling CrunchPad: Is Anybody Home?
• CrunchPad Prototype Peeks Out Again
• Web 2.0 Mogul Michael Arrington Creates New Web Tablet

Photo: CrunchPad Tablet/Techcrunch

Sometimes you have to take a step down to step up. That’s what Google should’ve done with its open source PC operating system Chrome OS, which the corporation demonstrated Thursday.

Instead, Google is positioning Chrome OS against Microsoft with a lightweight OS shipping with netbooks next year. Chrome OS will function as a modified browser, enabling netbooks to handle everyday computing with web-based applications. That’s right: No native software, just the web.

The philosophy behind Chrome OS is extreme: Go the web way, all the way. It’s a “paradigm shift to make the web synonymous with the computer,” as Mashable’s Ben Parr puts it. But it’s an idealistic vision that could take several years to actualize, given the currently limited state of wireless connectivity and web-based applications. Google is aware of that, and the company is merely massaging us with this radical idea of a web-only computing experience by suggesting we try it on netbooks first.

Looking ahead, the company said it plans to share Chrome OS with more-powerful devices, including notebooks and desktops. But we doubt consumers will show much interest in a Chrome OS netbook the way Google is currently packaging it.

With Chrome OS, the search giant is pushing an OS that enables us to do less — even less than already low-powered netbooks can do. Web apps can’t let us process Microsoft Word documents, sync our iTunes libraries, or edit photos with Photoshop, for example. Thanks to their crampy keyboards and small screens, netbooks aren’t ideal for productivity apps such as Photoshop or Microsoft Word — but you’d be surprised at the different uses for netbooks that made them last year’s hit product category. Watch what happens when Google offers an OS that doesn’t at least provide the option of using the aforementioned apps.

Of course, as Google’s pitch goes, there are web alternatives to everything. Cloud storage for backups, internet-streaming music and video services, and the Google Docs web suite for all your spreadsheet or word-processing needs. The list goes on.

The idea is such: Give up the computing experience you’ve grown accustomed to for over a decade. Come live in Google’s browser.

Why would anyone wish to do that today, tomorrow or even next year when the OS ships?

Michael Gartenberg, a tech analyst at Interpret, sums up the state of computer use today better than anyone else: “What we’ve seen is most users are looking for a combination of the two: rich applications on my desktop, and the apps where I want to be connected.”

“This idea that I’m somehow going to do away with rich app architectures and do everything through the browser is an old argument, and it’s never taken root,” he added.

The benefits of Chrome OS don’t seem to outweigh everything Google’s modified browser will do away with. The pluses: Tight security, thanks to Google’s careful monitoring for malware in Chrome OS apps; saving the money you’d spend on an external hard-disk drive thanks to cloud storage; ultimately, being able to “stop worrying about your computer,” as Google said in a promotional video shown at its Thursday event.

Stop worrying about our computers? We’re worried about you, Google. T-Mobile Sidekick customers should especially be disenchanted with the cloud. Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger hosted the data of all of T-Mobile’s Sidekick users in the cloud, and recently the server crashed, losing everything.

Nobody’s perfect, so it’s conceivable that the same thing could happen with Chrome OS. After all, Google’s Gmail service crashed in February and again in September this year. While no data was lost, it did cause hours of angst for people who had grown dependent on the mail service.

And then there’s money. Aside from losing access to the native apps we’ve paid for on our PC, it’s certainly imaginable that using Chrome OS could get expensive in general. If we wished to put an always-connected, web-app-only computer to good use, we’d need to purchase a data plan from a carrier. This could come in the form of an EVDO card or a smartphone tethering plan — in other words, a monthly bill. Google said Chrome OS will have caching features, so you won’t need internet access to do everything, but caching won’t provide the same offline experience as a full native application.

(Of course, our wireless problems could be solved if we could find an open Wi-Fi connection just anywhere we go. But unless you live in Mountain View, California, where Google provides free Wi-Fi, ubiquitous, free hotspots are not part of your reality.)

With all that said, there’s a ton of potential here for Chrome OS to be vastly appealing, and I’m keeping an open mind. To succeed with Chrome OS, Google should take a step down. To start, Google should modify Chrome OS into a “mini OS” of sorts that can live alongside another OS, such as Windows, on a netbook.

For comparison, Phoenix Technologies offers a mini OS called HyperSpace, which some netbooks are already shipping with. HyperSpace runs parallel to Windows as an instant-on environment, allowing netbooks to perform internet-centric functions without actually booting into Windows. Functions include multimedia players, browsers, internet telephony, e-mail and IM.

Sounds a lot like what Chrome OS is going to be, doesn’t it? That’s because it’s almost the same idea, only Phoenix Technologies is a lesser-known company (which developed the BIOS that boots many Windows computers today, by the way) and is taking a humbler approach — offering HyperSpace as an optional, complementary (but not complimentary) OS rather than a full-blown substitute for Windows. It’s an approach that could lead to greater results if embraced by an incredibly powerful brand like Google.

By offering Chrome OS as a free, downloadable mini OS that runs parallel to a full one, Google can still continue to expand its presence onto hardware — without having to sell the OS with netbooks. Consumers could still try out the benefits of Chrome OS and cloud computing when it’s convenient for them. Then, if users wished to boot into their primary OS to back up their data or do document processing with Microsoft Word, for example, they could — a hybrid, more feature-rich experience.

Unfortunately, not everything we want is on the web just yet. That’s not going to radically change in one year, and not even Google can change that.

See Also:

• Google Chrome OS: Ditch Your Hard Drives, the Future Is the Web
• Five Things Google’s Chrome OS Will Do for Your Netbook
• Google Announces PC Operating System to Compete with Windows …
• You Predict the Winner of OS Wars: Chrome, Windows, Linux, OS X?
• Google FAQ Reveals Chrome OS Hardware Partners

Photo: Melanie Phung/Flickr

Google plans to host an event on Thursday morning to provide an overview of Chrome OS, its upcoming PC operating system.

Google announced Chrome OS in July, 2009 without disclosing many details about the operating system. What’s known is that Chrome will be a lightweight, open-source, Linux-based OS with a strong focus on web surfing using the Google Chrome browser. Applications will run mostly inside the browser, which in effect turns the web into the platform. The Chrome OS will initially be targeted at netbooks — low-powered, miniature notebooks, Google said in July.

Still, we have yet to see any official visuals of the OS, and thus far the media has only speculated about Chrome’s potential. Google has said Thursday’s event will give a “complete overview” of the OS with technical background and demonstrations.

Some questions to ponder on before Thursday’s event:

• Will Google indeed proceed with plans to target the Chrome OS at netbooks? Compared to 2008, this year’s netbook shipments are slowing down, and the miniature devices are proving to be a recession-driven fad. Why target the OS at a played-out product category?
• What apps does Google have in store to launch with the OS? The success of a platform’s launch, after all, is largely determined by its initial software offerings.
• Will all apps be web-based, or will the OS support native programs as well? Apple’s first-generation iPhone supported web-based apps, and the company was roundly criticized for not providing access to the device’s native APIs until a year later.
• When can we have the OS? Since Chrome is open source, we can expect that having the OS will be as easy as downloading and installing it onto our PCs. Google hasn’t provided a time frame of when we can expect the OS, but hopefully Thursday will provide an official launch date.

Have any more questions? Post them in the comments below. Wired.com will be attending the event to try to get your questions answered.

Via TechCrunch

See Also:

• Five Things Google’s Chrome OS Will Do for Your Netbook
• Google Announces PC Operating System to Compete with Windows …
• Faked Screenshots Show Google Chrome Frenzy
• Google FAQ Reveals Chrome OS Hardware Partners

Photo illustration: Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com; Original photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

The Vega, from Converged Devices, wants to be the mythical Apple Tablet, and at first it looks as if it really could be a great alternative to that still non-existent machine, not least because it is actually real.

But dig into the specs and you start to see that this Android-powered (v2) tablet is not much more than a skinny laptop without a keyboard. First, though, the good parts.

The Vega will come in three sizes, 7, 11 and 15-inches, and packs (optional) 2G and 3G cellular radios along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. You also get an accelerometer, a front-facing 1.3MP camera, an ambient light sensor and a nifty magnetic dock into which the screen sticks and charges.

After that, things go downhill. The 15.6-inch screen has just 1366 x 768 pixels of resolution, less than a comparable notebook (the MacBook Pro’s 15.4-inch screen has 1440 x 900, for example). And that tablet essential, the touch screen, is resistive like the phones of old, and not capacitive like the iPhone. This also means no multi-touch.

Thought that this would make a great travel computer? Think again. The battery lasts just four hours, and that big docking station isn’t going to fit in a laptop bag. And the lack of GPS is a rather odd omission, too. What about a media-center? No again. The built in storage is just 512MB flash memory (plus another 512 megs of RAM for the NVIDIA Tegra chip to use), and you’ll need to add SD cards to add memory (up to 32GB), although a USB hard drive can be hooked up.

So what is it for? The press release makes a lot of the Vega being kitchen-friendly, so we guess that’s it. We hope it’s cheap, though, as a netbook also makes a great kitchen computer, and does a lot more besides. Price and launch will be announced at CES in January 2010.

Product page [Converged Devices]

Seeing as most ergonomics guides tell you not to tilt your keyboard up, a laptop stand may not be such a good idea for the desk, but AViiQ’s “Portable Laptop Stand” has other uses.

The obvious feature is that this stand folds, and when collapsed to its quarter-inch minimum can easily be slid into a laptop bag. The mechanism itself is quite neat, almost origami-like: The aluminum sheet is hinged with plastic. Two hinged sections swing under the main body and then the corners tuck through a pair of holes. These corner tabs both secure the “leg” in place and act as feet for the notebook above.

Aside from folding, the stand will keep the screen slightly higher if using the computer with an external keyboard. Most important, though, in these days of red-hot “laptops” is cooling, and the thin aluminum and ample air circulation whips away heat and lets your computer’s fans stay off for longer. It would also be perfect for in-bed movie watching: those warm sheets play hell with a notebook’s heat dissipation.

I’d probably grab one right away to replace the inverted baking-tray I normally use when working from bed, but the AViiQ Portable Laptop Stand cost $80. Ouch.

Product page [AViiQ]