Tag: crunchpad (Page 2 of 2)

CrunchPad situation is a hot mess

Arrington showing the bird.Arrington is pissed about this CrunchPad situation. So far, it seems pretty justified, but it’s a little strange to see so much information around the nuclear fallout for this thing made public. In a post titled “CrunchPad Litigation Imminent,” Arrington has laid out his next few steps in the legal process.

Apparently Fusion Garage claims Arrington knew the split was coming and that he and his team at TechCrunch contributed nothing to the device. I’m not sure how that could be, considering the name it bears. I’ll leave the rest of the details for Arrington to share, but suffice it to say he’s none too happy about tomorrow’s Fusion Garage press conference. His post contains emails from Chandra Rathakrishnan, Fusion Garage’s CEO, as well as the letters Arrington’s lawyers sent to the manufacturers regarding the situation. It’s all one big, ugly, entertaining mess.

Source: TechCrunch

Crunchpad demo coming Monday

Michael Arrington's Crunchpad.Here’s one of the biggest public face-slaps I’ve ever witnessed. This coming Monday, Fusion Garage will be giving a public demo of the Crunchpad, the web tablet for which Fusion Garage had partnered with Michael Arrington and TechCrunch. Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan will be giving the world the first look at a device it sounds, from Arrington’s report, like the manufacturer is trying to steal.

A big part of the demo will be Rathakrishnan explaining his side of the story. Obviously that’s going to differ from Arrington’s, but with so much split intellectual property and impending lawsuits, I doubt anything he says will guarantee public access to the device. It’s a shame, too. At $300 or so it was something I would definitely have considered purchasing for casual web browsing.

Source: San Francisco Business Times

The CrunchPad is dead

The CrunchPad is no more.Less than a month after claiming the CrunchPad was “steamrolling” toward production, Michael Arrington has pronounced his web tablet dead. Apparently there was a serious fallout with the manufacturer. Serious as in the manufacturer is going to try to sell the device itself. Without Arrington. Potentially under the CrunchPad moniker.

This is about as spectacular as device wars get. You can imagine Arrington is pissed, and bound to be throwing around any lawsuit he can think up. He writes this about the email he received from Fusion Garage, the company set to manufacture the web tablet.

Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

The rest of Arrington’s post on the subject is appropriately distressed. I’m still amazed Fusion Garage would try to pull this off, particularly two days before the product was set for a public launch. For more detail on the drama, head over to to TechCrunch and offer Arrington your condolences.

Source: TechCrunch

CrunchPad steamrolling toward production

CrunchPad.It’s been a long time since we’ve heard anything about Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad, the slim little web tablet the TechCrunch founder was developing. As Arrington has it, though, the project is moving forward, headed for production at some still unannounced date. The price has gone up from the original $200 to somewhere between $300 and $400.

A few months back everyone thought the CrunchPad was dead, doomed because of rising production costs. While the price has gone up, the new range is definitely reasonable, but what about the features? The longer the CrunchPad gets delayed, the less likely that it can really be competitive. Apple already has a desirable tablet in the works and ereaders like the Nook are getting sturdy enough to make the CrunchPad look irrelevant.

I can’t say a November release for $400 would have been better, because that’s the weird price point everyone seems to want to avoid. At this point, though, the CrunchPad needs some new life, or it’s going to be a huge flop.

Source: YouTube (Gillmor Gang)

Newer posts »

© 2025 Gadget Teaser

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑