The Crunchpad is dead

THE FOUNDER of technology blog Techcrunch, Michael Arrington has announced that his everyman Tablet PC project, the Crunchpad has been wrestled from his hands and, well, crunched.

Arrington first announced his intention to develop such a machine in July 2008, explaining "I'm tired of waiting - I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn't exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let's design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them."

By May of this year pictures of the device floated up, showing a 12-inch touch screen pad that skipped the desktop interface to launch web-friendly applications including Firefox, Skype and Google Docs. The Crunchpad squeezed an Intel Atom into its case along with 512MB of RAM, and it excited quite a few people.

Yesterday Arrington blogged that the Crunchpad, though a mere two weeks away from launch, had been shelved because of "greed, jealousy and miscommunication", and some apparent confusion over intellectual property rights. "On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner (Fusion Garage) on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject 'no good news.' Yuck, I thought." And rightly so it appears.

"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", he added.

There is not much room for negotiation on the table either, according to Arrington. "Renegotiations are always fine. But holding a gun to our head two days before launching and insulting us isn't the way to do that. We've spent the last week and a half trying unsuccessfully to communicate with them. Our calls and emails go unanswered, so we can't even figure out exactly what's happened."

The situation has arisen because neither firm owns the intellectual property rights to the CrunchPad themselves, and while TechCrunch owns the right to the Crunchpad name, they don't own the manufacturing. This means that Fusion Garage, which does, can make the hardware itself without even mentioning the Cruchpad name again. Good news to us because we were getting bored of typing the word Crunch, but a sad day for friendship and the industry.

As Arrington writes, "It's a sad day at Techcrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so...final...is a very hard thing to do. I'm enraged, embarrassed, and just...sad. The Crunchpad is now in the Deadpool". µ