I have been predicting an epic fail for this device since I first heard about it sometime last year. At one point I thought it may not even see the light of day, but knew the fail would come even if it did and even if it hit its original lala-land price point.

This is a perfect example of a solution looking for a problem. This same issue is why I didn't put much faith in Apple coming out with a similar device. They may come out with something tablet-like in the future, but I don't think it would be anything like this.

I can see some valuable vertical market uses for a tablet, especially one with budget-specs and of this size. But the consumer market isn't going to touch this thing at $300, let alone $499.

It's all but a guarantee that there will be more people reading about the Mike Arrington vs. Fusion Garage debacle surrounding the development of this product than there will be customers for it. You could put this thing into every Best Buy, Fry's, Bed Bath and Beyond, Walmart, Lowes and Home Depot and I'm confident it would still fail.

I'm sorry, but big tablets just aren't great for much of anything involving the web.

Its got a mediocre battery life, a custom OS + browser, significantly expensive than expected and it has limited storage. Its already fail :P

Oh and you can't put any apps on it. Its web only. At least for now. It might do an Apple and add support for it eventually.

Right. I had forgotten all about that. Even if it didn't boot straight into a web browser I still think the whole form factor would be enough to kill it. It could have been running full versions of Google's OS or even Windows and it would still tank in the grand scheme of things.

I can see them possibly trying to push it as a media/magazine/book reader, especially since that niche is also getting a ton of press this week (Conde Nast, Hearst, et al). But it's still unwieldily and way way too expensive. eBook readers are going to have to drop below $100 (maybe well below) to really gain serious traction. By serious I mean enough traction to change the publishing game the way digital music players have changed the music industry.

At least it has Flash support...

And Silverlight too...

Yeah, this was a failed idea from the get go. Tablets in general are not well-received, and it all comes down to the form factor, as you said Bruno. Basically, as the guys on GDGT laid out:

If you have a tablet with a screen smaller than 5", then you might as well just get an iPod Touch.

If it has a screen larger than 10", it is completely unpocketable, and not pleasant to used standing around. So you're likely to use it sitting down somewhere, and the size is just unwieldy enough to where you'll just want to have that keyboard and mouse to do anything productive. So you might as well get a netbook for $250.

If it's in between, you're in this weird area where it's still not pocketable so you can't easily take it on the go, and it's not large enough to get anything real done so you wouldn't sit down at home with it if you have another computer in the home.

I don't want to count Apple out of a product category though. They tend to get into a market that hasn't seen many good products, and suddenly make a device that everyone wants (well, they've only really done it twice, but that's two more times than nearly any other company).

The only other products that I think can do something in this area are things like the mythical Courier. But even then, I can't imagine it doing any better than selling to a small niche of people who really love it.

Lastly, it's sort of funny that this functionally limited tablet couldn't make it to market even at $500, when Archos is releasing a fully-functional 9" tablet with Windows 7 on it. I don't think that device will do well at all either, but at least it looks poised to actually come to market. And if I'm looking at these two products, I think I'm more likely to spend another $50 and get the Archos.