Well, that’s it.  The Crunchpad is dead.  And after reading Michael Arrington’s post regarding the matter I’m saddened, really saddened by the turn of events (that is according to him).  Apparently Fusion Garage (the company building the Crunchpad) and its shareholders have decided to boot Arrington and co from the project stating no reason or offering to renegotiate the terms.  According to Arrington, he jointly owns the intellectual property behind the Crunchpad and solely owns the trademark, which makes Fusion Garages attempt to still to sell the device, albeit rebranded, as a ludicrous proposition.  What really sucks is that Arrington was just days away from announcing preorders for the device.  He already had an agreement in place with a major retailer to distribute the device who had agreed to pay for the units up front to offset their costs and help them ship them from China using their own planes.  I think Arrington best summed up the debacle with “This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.”

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