The CrunchPad, a simple touch-screen computer for Web-browsing only, is nearing reality with a company formed to oversee its manufacture.
A dream product of TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, the CrunchPad is designed to be "dead-simple," in Arrington's words. With just a half gigabyte of RAM, a 4 GB solid state drive and no physical keyboard, the device isn't capable of much besides running Firefox on Linux.
In addition, the CrunchPad will have a single button for powering on and off, and will include headphone jacks, one USB input, low-end speakers, a microphone and a Web cam. The idea is to sell it for cheap, possibly around $200.
The product, or at least the concept, has been known about for some time, but it's getting traction now that CrunchPad, Inc., is taking shape. Arrington told the San Francisco Business Times that a prototype will be ready to show at the end of this month, with "big news" coming around the same time. As the head of a major technology blog, I'm assuming Arrington grasps what is actually major news and what is baseless hype.
Which raises an admittedly off-topic point: How will TechCrunch and its spin-off blogs treat a product created by one of its own? News stories are sure to mention who's behind the product, but I don't envy whoever's assigned to review the CrunchPad down the line.
