The curious case of TechCrunch’s missing CrunchPad tablet

The curious case of the missing CrunchPad

There’s a tech mystery afoot! Where has the much rumored, much talked about, much anticipated, much aggrandized CrunchPad wandered off to? It’s a case that tech heads on the internet are clamoring to resolve. It’s shaping up to be the largest cliffhanger since the ending of Angel. Well it’s time to put on the CSI: Miami sunglasses and kick on The Who. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

It all started in July of 2008 when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington announced they were working on a “dead simple” internet tablet that would cost $200 and be a “Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine.”  A month later the first prototype was shown. The next major update didn’t happen until January of 2009 when Arrington updated the progress of the CrunchPad, including the now known name, and talked about features that was now included in the second prototype (or Prototype B). It was now a 12 inch, 1024 x 768 resolution, 4:3 ratio touch screen tablet with 1GB of RAM, a 4GB flash drive and a built-in accelerometer. With this news came an adjustment to the original price. Arrington now said that $299 would be a more realistic price point.

After a leak in April, TechCrunch released more pictures of the third version of the CrunchPad and issued the following statement: “Doubters, feel free to eat your hats at this point. It’s real and it’s spectacular.” At this point though, it would seem the hat is on the other head, or at the very least, boiling in a nice vat of broth as to soften up the texture. The post also promised “full disclosure” of the tablet by the end of that week including a video demo. However, it was nearly two months later before another update — this one showing more pictures of the third prototype including referencing the width of 18mm (or 7/10ths of an inch) for the first time. A video demo of the device as also released. In the demo you can clearly see that there are still issues with the CrunchPad’s ability to play YouTube’s popular FLV video format.

The next month Peter Ha at CrunchGear teased the CrunchPad and said that Arrington would be scheduling an announcement the end of July or beginning of August to officially announce the product. Ha also said that the product would be available “as soon as possible.” Sometimes names can tell you something.

And so here we are at nearly the end of September with nary a further word regarding the CrunchPad. Most expected Arrington to spill the promised beans at the TechCrunch50 event which happened September 14th and 15th. The event came and went without the slightest mention of the device. And thus ends the background information for the case. Put on your super sleuth hats and help solve the mystery of…

Michael Arrington and the curious case of the missing CrunchPad!

We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on what happened to it. Should we be looking for a lady of Latino persuasion who loves big hats and the color red? Maybe Steven Soderbergh got his hands on it in preparation for the next Ocean’s 14 movie. Maybe Arrington is just keeping it to himself after renaming it Rosebud.

Personally we think that the CrunchPad must have run into some serious issues with its SaaS cloud computing ability. Fusion Garage had been working on a completely new OS for the tablet that would utilize minimal resources and allow the main workload to be handled by servers instead of the individual device. In fact, it’s something we’ve all been excited to see. It may be that there’s just a little to much pie in that cloudy sky to be realistic and the CrunchPad may have found it out the hard way.