If Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) does indeed go through with delivery of a long-rumored tablet – jokingly called the iPad on some blogs – it will have a most unlikely competitor: publisher Michael Arrington of the TechCrunch.com tech blog fame.

Arrington first acknowledged his plans for a hardware product in early July in the San Francisco Business Journal. The product, dubbed the "CrunchPad," is a touch-screen tablet designed for Web surfing and other Internet use and was designed with reader input.

Arrington didn't get into the technical details of his creation, but the Singapore-based newspaper The Straits Times did. It profiled a small start-up called Fusion Garage that developed the device for Arrington.

The CrunchPad sports a 12-inch screen, bigger than the rumored 10-inch screen of the iPad, and weighs 2.6 pounds (1.2kg). It runs a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, includes 1GB of RAM and has its own proprietary Web-centric browser operating system created by Fusion Garage, based on WebKit.

The entire system is touch-driven with a virtual keyboard for typing and a simple finger swipe for other actions. It comes with an accelerometer, one USB port, and built-in Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Its biggest omission is no storage, not even flash storage. The Straits Times projects the price at US$399.

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