CrunchPad: Looking Good, May Not Happen
Image courtesy of TechCrunch
Those pics of the TechCrunch CrunchPad that “mysteriously” appeared on the web yesterday are now all over the place and Arrington had to give us the state of the union about them. The CrunchPad is looking pretty darn good if you ask me, but it’s important to bear in mind that this thing may not ever appear on the market.
There are lots of factors involved and let’s hope that Arrington and crew get them all in line and that the CrunchPad does make it to market. Would I buy one? I don’t know, but my gut feeling is probably not. I’d have to see how good the touch-screen works with the on-screen keyboard since that’s the only way to get text into the CP. Like a lot of people I’ve moved largely to the cloud and that means that even though it’s not designed for it, I’d be needing to type in emails, Tweets and who knows what else. I think that fake keyboard would grow tiresome awfully fast. I hope I get a chance to play with one though. Mobile tech is cool.
Checkout Techcrunch’s latest post on this. As they state, the device isn’t designed for any serious text input and is geared towards those looking to READ their email, watch videos and other things like that. Right now they say it costs them $250 to manufacturer which doesn’t seem bad but at the end of the day it is just an oversized MID.
it’s a couch surfer, not a heavy duty email device.
Sent from my iPhone…
For $300, I need more functionality. We need someone like Dell with experience in this stuff and can source components at good prices to make it. You can get a Dell Mini 9 with Linux for like $200. Why not a Dell Mini 9 slate?
Interesting idea Dave, The Mini 9 Slate.
Then again, I have this older TC1100 I have been using and it does all this and more………..
What worries me most, is that *if* this thing becomes a success, companies like Acer and Asus will have their own version on shelves in a matter of months. Just look what happened with the Eee – one machine, and now we have 100’s.
I like the idea of a slate, but I can’t help think that a convertible Netbook like the Gigabyte T1028 would be a better/more flexible machine.
Still, good luck to them, I’m impressed that they got this far.