Perhaps … NEVER! The last few days have been full of rumors that the Crunchpad is dead, but is it? Are Mike Arringtons dreams of producing a $200 $300 tablet dead in the water?
The time-line behind the Cruchpad does play out like your typical too-good-to-be-true vaporware product, but the evidence of real working prototypes and even fancy packaging have leaked into the wild making this more than some drawing board pipe-dream. It’s real, it works and we’ve seen it.
Many seem to think that the project might be scrapped due to higher than anticipated production cost. Arrington has stated that he wants to sell the CrunchPad as cheap as possible — initially shooting for the $200 price point, and later saying “you can sell it for $300 and probably not go out of business”. Is cost the sticking point? Are they worries that people won’t pay more than $300 for a tablet that won’t do anything more than surf the web?
Another popular theory is that Fusion Garage and their Linux/WebKit based browser OS may be the hitch in the giddy-up. Perhaps with Google and their open source Chrome OS seemingly around the corner, Mike has made the decision to dump Fusion Garage and wait for the Google offering to become a reality. This would definitely put the CrunchPad in a holding pattern, but since Google Chrome OS is bound to be very well developed and more full-featured than the Fusion Garage offering, it seems it’d be a much smarter way to go.
So, is the CrunchPad dead? Has the project run into problem it can’t overcome or are the delays just a reflection of changes in market overall? I for one hope to to be sitting on my couch, surfing all my favorite blogs on a CrunchPad, or Google Tablet, in the near future.
TechCrunch has a full run-down on the Google Nav application that will ship with Android 2.0 (Eclair), along with a demo video. If you couldn’t tell by the screenshot alone, this is one killer navigation app. It includes plain English search, as you can see in the video below. Oh yeah, & did I mention that it’s a free application to boot? When, o’ when, will AT&T pick up some Android phones….?
You’d think that the majority of people that use a computer and a web browser know what a web browser is… Guess not.
“Some folks at Google” decided to create a little website to help those that can’t tell the difference between a PC, a browser and a web site.
Wonder if some folks at Microsoft could come up with one of these to help my parents understand the difference between Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office… That would be sweet.
In an article sure to rile up teh intarwebs, NetworkWorld details the results of some testing (by Microsoft, no less) in which the major browsers were exposed to known malware sites to see if they correctly identified & blocked them. The tests showed IE8 blocking 8 out of 10 sites correctly. The article goes on to say that the results of the rest of the browsers all depend on the way they use Google’s SafeBrowsing API. AdblockPlus+ NoScript works just fine for me, thxverymuch….
I’ve been playing with the new Google Chrome 3.0 Beta for the past few hours and I’m glad to see a fair number of changes happening. The browser is faster (30%?) and adds a few features that users have been begging for.
Google chrome now has themes support — not that there’s really a lot to theme, but that’s one of the reasons I like Chrome: minimal use of screen real estate. The selection of “themes” however, does nothing to dispel my belief that Google doesn’t believe in hiring “artistic” types.
Also, unless I’ve missed it in past releases, they’ve added “Incognito Mode”, a browser mode that covers your tracks and removes most traces of where you’ve been. Personally I don’t ever have much to hide so this isn’t particularly useful to me, but I’m sure there are plenty of cheating husbands and wivesprivacy conscious types out there that will appreciate Google thinking about them
Also notable are a few updates to the Chrome Home Page. The page now allows you view a list mode rather than thumbnails, moves your recent activities to a new spot on the screen and promises to have “even more” stuff on the home page. Another very basic change that many have been begging for is the ability to remove sites / thumbnails from the home page. Previously, people like my friend Brad who crashed on my couch and spent the whole night surfing porn on my laptop had no way to remove the sites from the home page. Glad they finally fixed that.
Overall, Chrome has not yet evolved enough to become my daily work browser, but it’s speed and minimal use of screen real estate have made it my top choice for casual web surfing. Hopefully future improvements will add a handful of the features, like plugins, that will make it more usable for the professional.
Rather than ship a stripped down version of Windows to European users, Microsoft has opted to go the “ballot” route. The ballot screen in Windows 7 will offer information and download links to many IE rivals such as FireFox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and others.
In the wake of last week’s developments, as well as continuing feedback on Windows 7 E that we have received from computer manufacturers and other business partners, I’m pleased to report that we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe in October that we will ship in the rest of the world. –David Heiner, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Microsoft
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