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

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)