Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago…And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.

To make matters worse, Fusion Garage CEO Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan held a private press conference today to tell his side of the story, and perhaps more importantly to announce that the CrunchPad had been renamed JooJoo, and would launch in eight to ten weeks, without Arrington. CNET’s Rafe Needleman was on hand and had a chance to play with the JooJoo:

The hardware is slim and pleasing to hold. The screen is gorgeous, and huge, and the plastic back is gently curved. The unit is very slim, thinner than a MacBook Air. There are no buttons on the device, save the single power switch.

Sure, the device certainly looks great, but I can’t help but feel it still has that “beta” vibe. The performance is sluggish, and unless Fusion Garage can keep the retail price down as Arrington originally conceived, I do not see many rushing out to buy this thing in its current state.

What was once considered one of the “10 Most Brilliant Products of 2009” by Popular Mechanics had suddenly turned into a product nightmare for Mike. With wild speculation over the possibility of an Apple tablet launch next year, many tech pundits believed Arrington wanted to capitalize on the sudden rise in tablet love and launch a product ahead of the Cupertino giant. Whether or not Arrington was riding the coat-tails of an Apple product rumor, however, became irrelevant; many were in fact genuinely excited to see the CrunchPad, an affordable touch device that promised to have the largest capacitive touch screen of its kind. Naturally, Arrington has launched legal action against his former partner, and had this to say on his Twitter account following Chandrasekar’s press conference:

There aren’t any more CrunchPad posts coming from us. It’s all in the lawyers hands now.

Only time will tell whether JooJoo will make its launch date amidst this escalating fiasco.

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1. Download and install FStream from the iTunes Application store on to your touch screen device of choice (iPhone/iPod Touch) – http://itunes.com/app/FStream
2. Once the app is installed, launch FStream and add the following address to your FStream “Favorites” – mms://a543.l8090152405.c80901.n.lm.akamaistream.net/D/543/80901/v0001/reflector:52405

You do not need to fill in the “Format” or “Bitrate” fields as they are populated automatically. That’s it! Now you can enjoy listening to Peter Maher blurt out “Yah Baby!” for just about every play.

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So while I’ll continue to keep this blog live, don’t expect updates to come every day as they once were. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/literallyfresh, or at Cinephile Magazine occasionally contributing reviews, but mainly behind the scenes tweaking the site, editing and publishing reviews, and producing, editing, and opining on our podcast.

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Browsing photos, music, and video files is a breeze and quite snappy. Subtitle support works right out of the box. The interface is reminiscent of the Playstation 3 and is very easy to navigate with the included remote control (comes with batteries!).

I was previously using my PC with TVersity software to stream content to my XBOX 360 over WiFi. Large HD files would choke and stutter, and having to leave my PC on while watching movies was costly. So all in all this was a great purchase ($149.99) and should pay for itself in no time. Highly recommended.

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Also, a great podcast produced by the Pixel Corps called The VFX Show goes into great detail surrounding said visual effects in episode 64. Check that out here.

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What if you could also access literature’s greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain’s hilarious travelogue, Roughing It? Today we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while buying your postage.

Read the rest of the post here. And point your mobile browser to  http://books.google.com/m for access to the books.

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Courtesy of PWN! YouTube:

Step 1: View a video on YouTube (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5j4McFzies)

Step 2: In the URL location box, type pwn in front of youtube, and enter (e.g. http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=c5j4McFzies)

Step 3: Save out your video in either FLV or MP4.

Awesome stuff! Thanks to Leo Laporte for letting the Twitter world know about this.

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The island, a rainy outpost in the Irish Sea, is promoting an offbeat remedy for digital piracy, which the music labels blame for billions of dollars in lost sales. Instead of fighting file-sharing, the local government wants to embrace it — and it is trying to enlist a skeptical music industry’s help.

Read the rest here.

The nominal fee for broadband users discussed in the article sounds definitely like a step in the right direction. Lets hope other nations adopt this model, assuming of course it generates the requisite revenue for the labels and artists.

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Windows 7 shows where Microsoft’s industry dominating OS has hardly changed from its Windows NT heritage — it doesn’t take very many clicks to find the ugly underpinnings of the OS, aspects like the “true” device manager that have hardly received an aesthetic upgrade, not to mention a functionality upgrade, in the past decade.

I was reminded of this little gem that has also lived on in the Windows OS. Does anyone actually use these display settings? Unreal.

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