Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad tablet was being written off as dead in the water by pundits in the industry, owing to the fact that Arrington was keeping mum on details since the summer. But just recently, Arrington resurfaced, announcing that the CrunchPad was on the way out and will sell between $300-$400.
The CrunchPad, Arrington says, costs in the upper $200′s to build, so it’s unlikely it’s going to cost less than that. He’s still looking for sponsors to help keep costs down. Firefox makes money by having Google as a sponsor (default search engine for the search box), so it’s speculated that Arrington is looking at such partnerships.
But things still aren’t looking good for the CrunchPad. The 12-inch Intel Atom-based tablet would’ve been awesome if it hit the shelves at $99, but for $300 — why not get yourself a fully-functional netbook?
Arrington is unfazed — he believes that in a few years, web tablets will be just as popular as netbooks are today. As it stands, there’s little doubt that the Apple Tablet is going to be a rough industry standard — but it’ll cost at least twice as much as the CrunchPad.
Arrington is a well-known entrepreneur, so it’ll be interesting to see if his CrunchPad project will take off as well as his blogs.
