Arrington and TechCrunch have officially filed suit against Fusion Garage for the tablet formerly known as the CrunchPad. Arrington is confident in his position, and seemingly for good reason. He’s the only side we’ve seen hard evidence from so far, and it’s looking like Fusion Garage may have really screwed the pooch here.

If you’re interested in the manufacturer’s many missteps, you can check out Arrington’s latest over on TechCrunch. The short version is this: Fusion Garage is funded by a chiropractor (read: they’re broke). They don’t have money to both make the device and hire an attorney for defense of this suit. Bearing that in mind, pre-order cash is likely going to pay for an attorney, so you won’t be getting your tablet any time soon. Fusion Garage may also be looking at further lawsuits from other partners, as the company probably had to give away IP to get this thing out on time. That’s not good.

As I mentioned before, any kind of investment in this device is a waste of money. It’s already so messy I can’t imagine anyone would actually want to be involved with it.

Source: TechCrunch

The Fusion Garage webcast has come and gone and there’s not much new to report. The company is indeed moving forward with the device formerly known as the CrunchPad, now dubbed JooJoo. It’s going to cost $499 instead of the approximate $300 for the original CrunchPad and will come in just one color.

I think I’m still siding with Arrington on this one. Chandra Rathakrishnan made a serious attempt to vilify Arrington during his webcast, and he mentioned several times that Arrington had contributed nothing, but then why has so much changed? Was the color scheme Arrington’s idea? And what of the price? Why is suddenly more than $100 more expensive than rumored, even at the highest CrunchPad prices?

Rathakrishnan’s one decent point came when he was asked if he thought the device could be a success without Arrington’s marketing. He reminded us that all we had from Arrington was blog posts. It’s true, but if that’s really all that Arrington and TechCrunch had contributed I doubt there would be serious legal action underway.

Unfortunately, the one truth I can see from this is that we won’t be seeing the device under either name. I know JooJoo is supposedly going to launch this week, but I’d be shocked if Arrington let that happen. If this goes to court and Arrington wins, you can bet he’s not going back into business with these guys. If he loses, it’ll likely be after a lengthy process, and JooJoo will be too little, too late. At $500 it’s already way too expensive for what it does.

Source: Gizmodo

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

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

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