Crunchpad alive and well, Arrington says: Potential e-book reader gizmo—if he can address some major issues
The spiffy-looking Crunchpad will ideally survive and thrive—and debut as a real product to provide us with yet another alternative to the expected Apple tablet. Michael Arrington, originator of the Crunchpad, says the project is healthy.
Along with others, however, I wonder about the future:
1) The price of $300-400 may seem steep next year for a device intended mainly for Net use. I’d hope the Crunchpad could run e-bookware without being tethered to the Net, but how knows?
2) There’s talk of advertising as a form of support. It had better be as non-obtrusive as Arrington claims. Of course, with advertising, the issue arises of why the cost could not be still lower.
3) Will the Crunchpad use Pixel Qi tech, which is expected to be cheap, cheap, cheap and have both LCD-style and E Ink-style modes.
4) How about existing and almost-existing competition from netbooks and tablets alike?
Keep in mind that I’m in my devil’s advocate mode. As an open-source booster, I want this one to fly!
For more check out a Techmeme roundup and Engadet and UMPC Portal, as well as as a Gillmore Gang vidocast.
November 15th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Isn’t non-obtrusive advertising sort of an oxymoron. From my own experience running Google ads in non-obtrusive (bottom of the page) locations, I’ll state that I display many hundreds of ads per click. Generating significant revenue by non-obtrusive ads is theoretically possible but I have a hard time believing it’ll pay for these devices. Times do change, but past experience with ad-supported internet, ad-supported PCs, and ad-supported eBooks doesn’t seem especially encouraging.
Still, looks like a beautiful device.
Rob Preece
Publisher
November 15th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I believe I read somewhere that he was thinking of advertising the way that Mozilla does it. When you buy the device and start up the web browser it would default to some default (Google/Bing?) search engine.
I don’t really think the advertising income from any one user would be sufficient to offset the device cost. It may be interesting as a revenue stream to techcrunch, but it would probably be negligible to the device cost.
Unless, the device was actually bundled with a service. For example, a data plan from a cell company, a wi-fi network such as boingo, or even as a subscription to a news source. The WallStreet Journal Techcrunch pad?