On the latest episode of the Gillmor Gang, Michael Arrington shot down recent rumors that his CrunchPad project was nearly dead.

During the show Arrington said the following:

The CrunchPad’s great actually, it’s actually steamrolling along. everything’s good, that stuff about costs being too high, was — I don’t know where it came from — actually costs keep coming down we’re just we’ve been working entirely on software for the last month trying to make it perfect to get it to market. So, it’s going great, should be big news on that shortly.

When asked how it will do against Apple’s tablet he said:

I’m not going to answer the question directly, I’ll answer it in a different way.  Apple builds perfect products and I think that I will probably buy a number of their tablet devices. From what I’ve heard and I think that it’ll be amazing. I actually wish Apple would build a much higher end tablet, with the MacBook Air hardware, and you know it’s so thin they could get a duel core architecture into a device that thin, it’d be amazing. I think their going to go a little lower end but our device is going to be a significantly less expensive device. It’s going to sell for somewhere between 3 and 400 dollars, it’s going to be a web only device, it only has browser, you can access the web with it, hulu, youtube, gmail, etc. I think it’s just going to be a different market segment. If you were to put the two devices next to each other I think that, maybe with the exception of the fact that our screen is going to be bigger, our screen is 12 inches, as far as I know theirs isn’t, I think you’d probably say “yeah the apple device is better,” but it might be at least twice as expensive and maybe more. So I think we’ll have a nice market segment.

Arrington also says that the device’s cost remains “in the high two hundreds” and that there is some “soft-revenue on the device in sponsorships and things like that without impacting the user experience.”

I’m excited about this tablet because I really want something with a bigger screen to surf the web on while I’m sitting in the living room. I don’t usually mind browsing the web on my iPhone but sometimes I want a bigger screen.

This is just further evidence that James Kendrick had no idea what he was talking about.

Previously:
7/31/09: CrunchPad Specs Revealed
7/5/09: Michael Arrington Forms CrunchPad Inc., Hardware Coming Very Soon
4/14/09: James Kendrick Claims CrunchPad May Not Happen, With No Evidence

Update 12/1/09: The CrunchPad’s Bizarre Ending

Update 12/10/09: Fusion Garage Announces the JooJoo Tablet