Michael Arrington, the founder of tech blog TechCrunch, made good on his promise to create his own hardware company, with the launch of CrunchPad Inc. Based in Singapore, the firm will employ a total of 14 employees and its first and only product, the CrunchPad Internet tablet, is expected to be revealed at a press event scheduled for the end of July.
TechCrunch has refined the design of its CrunchPad concept tablet, with a launch prototype that adds an aluminum housing and a flush display. The device has developed an appearance that resembles a large iPod touch, with slightly rounded corners and a glossy black bezel surrounding the touchscreen. Stepping away from a plastic case allowed the thickness to be trimmed down to 18mm, while also increasing rigidity.
An unintentional leak late Thursday has shown a major revision to TechCrunch's CrunchPad touchscreen tablet. Aside from being much thinner than older prototypes, the new version has switched from a VIA Nano processor to an Intel Atom and now has a wider, capacitive 12-inch touchscreen that should be easier to use. It also has a much more efficient software base that uses a custom Linux variant and WebKit-based browser that use just 100MB of space.
News site TechCrunch today revealed that it's much closer to launching a promised low-cost, touchscreen Internet tablet. Referred to now as the CrunchPad, the device has a 12-inch, 1024x768 touch display but includes netbook-grade components to keep the price and size down: the nearly button-free device will use a VIA Nano processor, 1GB of memory and a 4GB flash drive that are just enough to hold an interface that boots directly to a custom WebKit-based browser in Ubuntu Linux.
