A bombshell was dropped last week when Michael Arrington revealed that their “partner” FusionGarage has suddenly squeezed them out of the product THEY envisioned. I was so struck by how forthcoming Arrington was, that I read his blog post to my entire family at dinner that night. It was big news for any of us who were anxiously awaiting the release of the CrunchPad. But that wasn’t nuthin’ compared to today’s news…

Today a teaser site went live for a new tablet called the JooJoo. It is a dumb name for what looks like an interesting product. (At least from the two promo shots on the teaser site.) On that site you can sign up to get information when pre-ordering goes live this Friday. It looks neat, and both Judie and I were ready to pre-order so that we might review it here on the site. Then we found out a little detail on the mystery tablet… the company behind it is FusionGarage.

Yup, this IS the CrunchPad, minus the cool name and the visionary who thought it up. It does add some things into the mix, however like a $499 price  (almost double what Arrington envisioned) and the potential of some big-time legal drama.

Engadget quotes FusionGarage’s Rathakrishnan as stating “The death of the product has been greatly exaggerated.” And while Arrington took what I believe was a respectful but heartfelt high road, Rathakrishnan went on the attack stating, “”Anybody can write blog posts. There are dreamers and there are doers.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Judie and I, however, won’t be ordering it any time soon.