Does anyone remember the excitement about the HTC Shift that resulted in a series of total showstoppers that caused it to fade quickly from public view? Battery life, screen resolution and (slow) operating system were my personal deal-breakers and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from 3 years of product blogging it’s that people are very quick to get excited about a product en masse but when it comes to the crunch, there’s often a show stopper that kills interest, en masse.
The Crunchpad has been at number 1 in the UMPCPortal charts for about a month now and because we’re not particularly highly ranked for Crunchpad search terms it indicates that there’s rather a lot of traffic out there for it. In fact if you look at Google Trends you see that searches for Crunchpad are in the same ballpark as for the terms ‘UMPC’ and the popular ultra mobile PC brand ‘Viliv.’
The Crunchpad is clearly getting a good number of eyes and if it’s well executed it should sell well but the lessons of the HTC Shift have to be remembered. Battery life and operating system are the two main issues here.
Two years ago we wanted a 3hr minimum battery life on our portable devices. Now, that expectation is up to 5hrs which is going to be a tough call. It is possible with a well engineered Menlow-based design (probably not with a typical netbook-platform design) but then there’s the issue of software. Creating an end-user Linux build is extremely hard work. Whatever OS is chosen though, if Firefox takes more than 7 seconds to open and page loads average more than 10 seconds, its ‘slow.’ The iphone 3GS is in the 10-15 second range for average page load times now so there’s no excuse for slow page loads.
Finally there’s the price. Mike Arrington, the owner of the company has set a lot of expectations down at the $200-$300 level so if he misses that target by much he’s lost a lot of momentum. With well-built 8.9 inch 1KG Asus 900’s going for under $200 there’s a lot of competition.
I would love to see the Crunchpad succeed and for thousands of people to have a portable touch-based web solution available but I worry about the lessons we all learned from the HTC Shift.
Is the CrunchPad the next HTC Shift? Looking at the lessons learned. http://cli.gs/Nuq8u
RT @chippy: Is the CrunchPad the next HTC Shift? Looking at the lessons learned. http://cli.gs/Nuq8u
The Crunchpad details link says 12″ that’s not of interest to anyone anymore is it?? I wouldn’t even buy a Netbook with 12″ (too big for me).
For me the worst thing about htc shift was the price!
And for crunchpad tablet it could be the same :)
I never looked at the Shift seriously so I don’t know what it’s pricing was (is?) but I know that many people don’t really look at smartphones’s REAL price (without any contracts and unlocked) but look at the diffused prices they typically sell for.
I’d be okay with the Crunchpad costing a maximum of 400€, because I would use it on oniversity for annotating pdf scripts. For this and ebook reading it is interesting to me BECAUSE is will be the biggest netbook class touchscreen device I know.
Well, I heard they put 3G in this device, that is meant only for couch surfing and considering there is wlan at university, the usage scenario isn’t quite different there either. So this unnecesserily would push the price…
Then, they give it a cloud os and only 4GB internal storage from what I know. 8 GB + would have been nice, so I would have more space for installing an alternative os (4GB would get too small for me, effectively even 6GB did, assuming I’m using the card slot (I think there’l be one) merely as data storage).
Last thing: I don’t know if the recent prototype has a fan. Fanlessness has become a necessity of netbooks to me. The “B”-Prototype looked like having a fan, the newer prototype didn’t look like it anymore, so that’s a plus but I have not seen any confirmation on this.
Last thing will be availability in europe… I calculated the cost for the Always innovating touchbook and there I found, I can well assume 1€ = 1$ of effective cost, when importing (20% import tax, 50$ shipping there), plus I don’t know how to handle warranty with imported devices.
Then the release date. September would have been good, so I could start using it as a university device over all the term, but I guess aiming at christmas sales does the company better.
So these are my reasons to look forward or not to to the crunchpad. Before hearing the latest updates on (rumored or confirmed, I’m not sure) specifications such as 1.2 kg, cloud os, 4GB storage, 3G to push costs (without meantion of this being optional) I didn’t even think about buying another touchscreen device. Since I know the EEEPC T91 has no fan, I do.
I guess with the crunchpad being a mystery device in some technical aspects there will naturally be a bunch of people being disappointed from the final specs, whatever they will be.
The biggest problem that goes with the crunchpad is the uncertainty about price and specs.
At first it was “200$ at max”. That mark, however was soon lifted up to 300$. And after that, they decided it will, most likely be somewhere around 450-500$. Which actually is still cheap, considering it has a 12″ Touchscreen.
BUT you won’t be able to effectively take notes (afaik no active digitzer screen, just a simple touch screen), the 4 GB FlashHD is way too small for a current OS and the pre-installed OS, at least what I have seen of it in those Pre-Videos, just limit you again to … surfing.
A device that costs ~500$ (which will be ~600€ if it won’t be released in Europe) which can only surf the web, with very limited disk space, just isn’t gonna win against the Archos 9 / Viliv X70.
Another thing is the weight. I think that the viliv x70 is actually quite heavy (I have one sitting right next to me :) ). So I don’t wanna speculate about the crunchpad but I guess it’s gonna get quite heavy.
I was a BIG fan of the crunchpad, but there were no “final prototype pictures” and “no final specs” released to the public in early August.
This has driven me to buy a viliv X70 and if the price drops, I guess I’m gonna get myself an Archos 9 as well :).
cya cheza
Sometimes i think the Crunchpad will never be real. But i hope…
It is a big hype, lets hope that it is not a dream or a big mess.
Next HTC Shift? For me a clear no.