Arrington’s Crunchpad “Leaked”

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cruchpad

The embargo-phobic Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch fame, may have staged a “Crunchpad” leak to build buzz for his upcoming web tablet. I appreciate the economical and minimalistic hardware project goals. However, the relatively quaint notion of a single function Internet device may not fly in 2009. Those modern “netbook appropriate chipsets” enables so much more – why cripple restrict yourself to Firefox running in kiosk mode? Make it the default mode if you must, but how about also including Skype, IM, VNC, VLC, and photo organization software. Like a large number of phones and netbooks being offered at a similar $300 price point. He’s onto something with the larger (12″) screen (and kitchen counter stand), but my ideal couch-based computing device is much more than a browser. It’s also yet to be seen if Arrington’s assembled a team that’s prepared to handle the marketing, sales, and ongoing support (and related expenses) of a CE venture.

7 thoughts on “Arrington’s Crunchpad “Leaked””

  1. Barf. My two least favorite things, Micheal Arrington and dedicated proprietary hardware, together at last. I assume it uses wifi to connect, but if it uses a SIM card, that would just be icing on this cake of evil.

  2. I don’t know he may be onto something. I’d love to have a touchscreen in the kitchen for surfing through recipes. Throw in TV access or at least streaming video with a wifi connection and I might even pay more then that. Cooking and cleaning is a lot more enjoyable when you’re distracted.

  3. I like the hardware concept/form, what I’m reacting to is the limited software. Perhaps we’ll hear some good news whenever the “official” launch is.

  4. Dave, has Michael said that they plan to keep the software closed? I thought, this device is supposed to run a customized Ubuntu version, so even if default software is “crippled”, it’d not be too much effort to unlock it & run full-featured Linux distro.

  5. I believe he said the earlier build was stripped down Ubuntu. Today he says the latest iteration includes “a bottom-up linux operating system and a new version of the browser” – which I’m assuming may be less useful.

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