Update: The NYT has corrected the price and thickness. Too bad, not $250 anymore.
The San Francisco Business Times wasn’t the only one that interviewed Michael Arrington recently. The New York Times interviewed him over the weekend and more juicy details have emerged.
The CrunchPad will sell for less than $250, which was actually Arrington’s low end estimate (correction: it will sell for less than $300, which was Arrington’s high end estimate) . In April when pictures of Prototype C were released, he said it can be built for less than $250 and “you can sell it for $300 and probably not go out of business.”At this price point, consumers might not be as hesitant to purchase yet another mobile device to access the internet. It will come in several colors and be 0.7 inches (18 mm) slim, which is a tenth more than the recently announced Archos 9 (correction: it will be 0.6 inches (16 mm) thick, the same as the Archos 9).
In addition, the NYT report mentions that most of the 14 employees in Singapore are part of FusionGarage, and that “TechCrunch is now closing its acquisition of the start-up.” FusionGarage is the OS-less start-up led by Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, a proven entrepreneur in his own right.
In the post that kicked off the project in July of 2008, one of Arrington’s dreams was that the tablet would boot straight to the browser. “The idea is to turn it on, bypass any desktop interface, and go directly to Firefox running in a modified Kiosk mode that effectively turns the browser into the operating system for the device,” he said. But in September of 2008, FusionGarage was one of the participants at DemoPit, an event part of the annual TechCrunch50 conference where start-ups launch their products or just get more exposure. It is here where Arrington’s dream came true.
Arrington said there should be a press event at the end of July or early August to make a “big announcement” about the CrunchPad.
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