Fusion Garage founder Chandraseka Rathakrishnan (centre) and his team appear to be on track to launch their Crunchpad touchscreen tablet by November, hopefully ahead of Apple's rumoured tablet which reportedly will be available by the end of the year. -- ST PHOTO: STEPHANIE YEOW
A SINGAPORE company is racing to be the first in the world to bring an almost mythical creature - the touchscreen tablet computer - to the market.
Nuts and bolts
Dimensions: 12.77 by 7.83 inches, and 0.74 inch thick.
The start-up, Fusion Garage, has teamed up with famed American technology blog Techcrunch and aims to get its machine out by November, in time for the Christmas buying rush.
The company gave The Straits Times a sneak preview last week. The fully working model, called a Crunchpad, has a 12-inch screen and weighs 1.2kg.
It allows users to watch YouTube videos, listen to music and edit documents, among other things.
Its operating system, or OS, was also developed in-house. The device will not have storage space - which some analysts have pegged as a big drawback - and will instead run programs hosted on servers: so-called cloud computing.
This means that editing a document, for instance, requires users to access the relevant software via the Internet. Once a document is completed, it will be saved via the Internet too.
The race to launch the touchscreen tablet has captivated computer geeks worldwide, with a large amount of speculation, and anticipation, centred on Apple.
Rumours of a 10-inch Apple tablet device in the vein of the iPhone and iPod Touch have abounded over the last few months. Early this week, the Financial Times reported that Apple's device will be available by the end of the year.
Fusion Garage's Singaporean founder, Mr Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan, 29, said he is not worried about the possibility of going up against Apple. 'It's two different market segments. The Apple tablet will likely be applications-driven. Ours will be Web-driven.'
If anything, he said, the American technology giant will help the Crunchpad by raising awareness of such products. Analysts see a touchscreen tablet as a forerunner of the Next Big Thing in computing - touchscreen PCs and laptops.
Read the full story in Friday's edition of The Straits Times.
