CrunchPad will soon come true after Michael Arrington, founder of the influential tech blog, held a one-year talk of building a touch-screen tablet laptop computer for Web surfing.
Arrington has integrated d a separate company called CrunchPad, but he said will not hold an event at the end of July or the beginning of August to make a big announcement about the CrunchPad, and the tablet will be for sale “as soon as possible.”
A corporate lawyer, who turned into a blogger, Arrington is not really the résumé of a hardware developer. He said he only wants it, and no one will build it. The purpose of the CrunchPad will be very simple, that is, surfing the Web, then turn it on and up comes a browser. It is nothing more than an Internet consumption device for reading, checking e-mail or watching video.
Besides, it will not have a hard drive or keyboard, although users can plug it in to a keyboard if they wish. It will cost less than US$300. The CrunchPad will be 16 millimeters thick with a screen of at least 12 inches that is flush with the aluminum case, and it will come in different colors. It will run on an Intel Atom chip and support Flash, which the Apple iPhone cannot.
Arrington said the CrunchPad will be different from netbooks, the mini-laptop computers made by companies like Acer, Asustek and Dell that my colleagues have written about. Many of those have small keyboards and offer more capabilities than just a browser, like running Microsoft Word.
The additional applications bog down the performance of netbooks, he said, so most people will find it works as good as a netbook or better. He said it will also be different from the tablet computer that Apple is rumored to be building. He has speculated that an Apple tablet could run iPhone applications and be US$500-1,000. He said he done not intend to be the Pre for the iPhone, because this is very different from what they are doing.
The project started a year ago, when Mr. Arrington wrote a post asking for help from readers to develop a “dead simple Web tablet.” Since then, it has been referred to internally as “Mike’s science project,” and he said he has been spending two-thirds of his time over the last six months working on it.
Most of the development work has been done by his team of 15 in Singapore. They are part of Fusion Garage, a start-up with the motto: “What if the browser could boot without an OS? How different would the world be?” The team showed up at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference, and TechCrunch is now closing its acquisition of the start-up.
Building hardware has not been as hard as he thought it would be, he said, though he was surprised by the ferocity of the competition, which he said has been much more cutthroat than it is among software and Web companies.
The development of the CrunchPad has been funded internally, Arrington said. He would not comment on whether he has raised outside capital but said that TechCrunch is a very small shareholder. He said he will remain actively involved for now, but wants to replace himself at CrunchPad and return his full-time focus to the blog.
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