Michael Arrington’s CrunchPad Killed After Hardware Partner Attempts to Oust Him From the Project

After a year and a half of development and speculation, the CrunchPad, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s pet tablet project, is officially dead. And before you dismiss it as vaporware, it sounds like the CrunchPad was close to launching.

According to Arrington, in a bitter yet wistful post, his hardware partner, Chandra Rathakrishnan (of the company Fusion Garage), e-mailed him two weeks before the target launch date to tell Arrington that Fusion Garage had decided to sell the CrunchPad without the TechCrunch team, and that it would be releasing it under a different name.

Arrington, a Silicon Valley lawyer-turned-blogger, contends that Fusion Garage’s move is nothing less than an attempt at intellectual property theft. “This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build [sic] the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple,” he wrote. Arrington added that he and his associates would likely sue Fusion Garage, as well as Rathakrishnan and his share holders individually.

In the rest of the post, Arrington, who described himself as “enraged, embarrassed, and sad,” described how close the tablet was to launching.

He said, for instance, Intel had agreed to supply its Atom processors at a “generous” cost, despite low sales projections. Meanwhile, he claims, a “multi-billion-dollar” retail partner was so enthusiastic, it offered to cover the tablet’s shipping costs. Arrington and Co. had already put 1,000 up for pre-order.

There’s no word yet on when or if Fusion Garage is going to ship their own tablet, based on Arrington’s designs. As of now, it looks the CrunchPad has been consigned to the vaporware dustbin of history.