It's alive! TechCrunch's Internet tablet still has a pulse

crunchpadb5TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington’s Internet tablet project is alive and well it seems, after photographs of the latest “CrunchPad” prototype were published online.

In a blog post, Arrington says that the images were mistakingly leaked, although this is being questioned by many in the tech blogosphere, which has predictably worked itself into a frenzy. Whether or not the leak was intentional only Arrington knows, although comments attributed to him over at CrunchGear – a TechCrunch property – claim that the incident has “completely screwed” project partner Fusion Garage who’ve been instrumental in designing the latest prototype. This, along with photos depicting a very finished looking product, including what looks like retail packaging, suggest that the “CrunchPad” could be closer to market than Arrington is letting on.

Spec-wise, a few other tidbits from Arrington’s post: the resistive touch screen has been ditched for a more finger-friendly capacitive one, as has the Via chip, being replaced by Intel’s Atom. Other than that, much remains the same, albeit in a more refined design – a 12 inch screen and keyboard-less tablet form factor that boots straight into a WebKit-based browser with Linux conspicuously running under the hood. Ideal, says Arrington, for “reading emails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat…”

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last100 is edited by Steve O'Hear. Aside from founding last100, Steve is co-founder and CEO of Beepl and a freelance journalist who has written for numerous publications, including TechCrunch, The Guardian, ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb and Macworld, and also wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary, In Search of the Valley. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

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