We have been reading about a web browser-based tablet computing device called a CrunchPad. As first announced a year ago,1 it was supposed to have Wi-Fi, half gigabyte of RAM, and a 4-gigabyte solid state hard drive and Google’s Gears for offline storage of web data such as documents and email.

Gears is a software facility provided by Google that allows browser-based applications to be productively and efficiently used offline.2

Some months ago, an updated announcement told us that the device now had 1 gigabyte of RAM and still a 4-gigabyte solid state hard drive that would hold the cache.3

More recently, pictures have been published4 showing the entire front page of the New York Times apparently viewable on the device.

In essence, the proposed device essentially does everything with a web browser and includes several gigabytes of local storage and runs Gears.

The Gears facility and local storage will let the user continue to edit and read documents and review his saved email. And, presumably compose email for sending, which would remain queued until a network connection was available.

Local storage, offline access to cached documents, offline access to cached email—yes?

No, apparently not, according to this Doomsday headline:5

Why The CrunchPad Is Toast.

And here, according to that Writer, are some of the reasons why the CrunchPad is allegedly toast:

The device has no local storage.

The device has no local apps, and only runs Web sites and Web apps.

This, again, tethers you to an Internet connection for even the simplest function, like skimming an old email, reading an e-book, or looking at a to-do list. This also means that app performance will also depend on your Internet speed.

How do we reconcile these claims with the published descriptions of the CrunchPad that we cited above, and of the well-known ability of Google’s Gears to let you run your Gears-enabled applications efficiently without networking connectivity?

We speculate that the Writer had nothing useful to say, decided to come up with a headline that would get him some hits, did a hasty web search and found a page where Michael Arrington stated that the CrunchPad “has no hard drive”,6 figured that “no hard drive” must mean “no local storage”, and that that was enough for a Doomsday article.

If this isn’t an example mindless blogging, we at Finding Fault don’t know what is.

A tablet with no local storage? What nonsense. Even low-cost cellphones have local storage these days, and Apple’s iPod line of gadgets have multi-gigabytes of it.7 Any device that lets you access email and do web browsing has got to have local storage. And it would make no sense to not use Gears, since it’s free, and it works, and it’s already used to allow browser-based applications to run offline.8

  1. Article “We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It.” by Michael Arrington dated 2008-07-21 in blog “TechCrunch” http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/we-want-a-dead-simple-web-tablet-help-us-build-it/ visited 2009-08-01. “I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. … [A thin] touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. … It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. … Add Gears for offline syncing of Google docs, email, etc.” ↩
  2. Web page “Gears” by Google. “Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser: Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop. Store data locally in a fully-searchable database. Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance.” http://gears.google.com/ visited 2009-08-01. ↩
  3. Article “TechCrunch Tablet Update: Prototype B” dated 2009-01-19 by Michael Arrington in blog “TechCrunch” http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/19/techcrunch-tablet-update-prototype-b/ visited 2009-08-01. “It is powered with a Via Nano processor, which has performed at par with the Intel Atom in our testing. 1 GB of ram (its more than we need) and a 4 GB flash drive to store the OS and browser and any cache.” ↩
  4. Article “CrunchPad: The Launch Prototype” dated 2009-06-03 by Michael Arrington in blog “TechCrunch” http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/crunchpad-the-launch-prototype/ visited 2009-08-01. ↩
  5. Article “Why The CrunchPad Is Toast” dated 2009-07-31 by Dan Frommer in blog “The Business Insider Silicon Alley Insider” http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-crunchpad-is-toast-2009-7 visited 2009-08-01. ↩
  6. Article “About Those New CrunchPad Pictures” dated 2009-04-10 by Michael Arrington in blog “TechCrunch” http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/10/about-those-new-crunchpad-pictures/ visited 2009-08-01. ↩
  7. Article “iPod” in online encyclopedia “Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia” by unknown authors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod visited 2009-08-01. ↩
  8. Article “Zoho Writer Supports Offline Editing” dated 2007-11-26 by Raju Vegesna in blog “Zoho blogs” http://blogs.zoho.com/general/zoho-writer-supports-offline-editing visited 2009-08-01. “With today’s update, you’ll now be able to view and edit your documents offline. This functionality is based on Google’s open source project Google Gears. We thank them for the project and their support.” See also article “Announcing offline access in Gmail Labs” dated 2009-01-27 by Joyce Sohn in blog “Official Google Enterprise Blog” by Google http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/01/announcing-offline-access-in-gmail-labs.html visited 2009-08-01. “If you enable offline access, Gmail will load in your browser even when you don’t have an Internet connection. You can read messages, star, label and archive them, compose new mail and more. Messages ready to be sent will wait in your Outbox until you’re online again.” ↩