The Crunchpad, a touch screen tablet device developed jointly by Michael Arrington (at Techcrunch, a pretty well known tech blog) and Singapore start-up company Fusion Garage, is dead.

This is pretty bumming news, because the Crunchpad looked to be one sexy piece of computer hardware. I mean, look at it. It looks like something Apple would design, and a Mac tablet is something Mac fans have been having wet dreams about for forever:

A blog post on Techcrunch details Michael Arrington’s side of the story (I recommend reading it, if only for the drama-entertainment value). According to the post, the beginning of the end was when Fusion Garage’s founder, Chandraseka Rathakrishnan, sent Arrington an e-mail just 2 days before the product was supposed to launch. This e-mail apparently said that, upon pressure from its shareholders, Fusion Garage decided to move forward to produce the Crunchpad… without Techcrunch’s involvement.

I’ve always thought of the Crunchpad as a joint job from the start – the Straits Times even had a hands-on preview on it, saying that it was a result of a team-up between Fusion Garage and “famed American technology blog Techcrunch” – and Arrington is pissed. “We jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, and we solely own the CrunchPad trademark. So it’s legally impossible for them to simply build and sell the device without our agreement,” he writes.

Everything has now apparently gone straight to hell, with nobody answering Arrington’s phone calls and e-mails, and it looks like the Crunchpad is well and truly dead. Meanwhile, Arrington writes that he’s probably going to sue Fusion Garage, and possibly Chandraseka and his shareholders as individuals.

I’m kind of sad that a local start-up is getting such bad press, and I’d love to hear their side of the story (Fusion Garage’s website is currently down). Arrington is… well, not someone I’d usually agree and/or side with, but it does look like he and Techcrunch got shafted up the rear.

I guess I’ll have to keep on waiting for Apple to release that mythological tablet.