I have to applaud Michael Arrington for going out of his comfort zone and taking on a sizeable project that is not guaranteed to be successful but if fairly successful, will make a small impact on the tech industry, rather than just reporting on it (like he does now).
Here's some pics - <a href="http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/09/crunchtablet-hits-the-net-a-little-early/" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/09/crunchtablet-hits-the-n...</a><p>Here's the original post from TC that got this started - <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/" rel="nofollow">http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-w...</a><p>I wonder if they are still planning to keep the hardware design specs open-source - that would be pretty cool<p><i>Edit: here is a video demo - looks cool! <a href="http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/09/crunchtablet-hits-the-net-a-little-early/*" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/09/crunchtablet-hits-the-n...</a>
I think Arrington is vastly overestimating the number of people who will actually buy a CrunchPad. It will cost more than $300, be too big to be portable, but too crippled (no keyboard, no OS, no file storage, etc.) to be anything more than a toy.
Really like the [obvious?] crunchpad product. I really expect a new generation of products cloning iPhones, Kindles because Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia are sleeping under its comfort zones. Cheers to ASUS too!
I doubt TechCrunch has the expertise to make this thing as good as say, the Kindle. I know people who work at Amazon, and that company has really good engineers. I can't imagine TechCrunch does.<p>Arrington is just a Jeff Bezos wannabe, but he's missing the point. He thinks hardware+media=money. But it needs to be good hardware!