I haven’t written as much here recently as I like to, but I have a good excuse: I’ve been hard at work writing for other sites. Three new stories are up today:

* At TIME.com, I reviewed two new Android phones from Motorola: the potent (and battery-hungry) Droid Bionic, and the basic (and thrifty) Triumph.

* TIME also asked me to try and make sense of the drama going on over at AOL and TechCrunch. I’m not even sure if that’s possible, but I tried.

* Over at AllBusiness.com, I wrote about a newish gadget that small businesses seem to be snapping up with the same zea they once adopted IBM PCs and PalmPilots. It’s called the iPad.

Whew! (And stay turned for another bit of related news in the not-too-distant future.)

I’m beginning to think that I’m the only person on the planet who feels this way, but bear with me: I have an astoundingly elastic notion of what a PC is. I don’t think it has to run Windows. I don’t believe it needs to come in a desktop tower or a portable clamshell case. If it’s a general-purpose computing device that allows me to run third-party apps, I think of it as a PC–whether it’s a ThinkPad, a MacBook, an iPad, a Droid, or a ChromeBook.

That was the line of thinking that led me to title my TIME.com column for this week “The PC Isn’t Dying–It’s Just Evolving.” I don’t see the iPad as a not-PC; I see it as a PC that happens to come in a new form factor, run new software, and be optimized for somewhat different use case scenarios than a garden-variety laptop.
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I’m trying out Spotify–the much-loved music service from the UK that debuted in the US today. I’m still forming opinions. In the meantime, TechCrunch’s Matt Burns has a good comparison of it with my current favorite, Rdio. (Spoiler: He likes ‘em both, but prefers Rdio overall.)

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler is excited over what might be the most Minority Report-like interface to be commercialized to date.

Yesterday, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about an unreleased Facebook photo app for the iPhone. Today, he’s reporting that Facebook is working on a super-ambitious platform for Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad–one that uses HTML5 to deliver the sort of experience usually associated with native iOS apps. He doesn’t have any real details, but it could be cool, and would explain Mark Zuckerberg’s famous disinterest in doing a Facebook app for the iPad.

There are some nifty browser-based mobile apps out there–Google’s Gmail for phones and tablets comes to mind. But there hasn’t been a truly killer app yet of the sort that leaves millions of people thinking that Web apps rather than local apps are the wave of the future. If Facebook is at least trying to pull off something like that, it’s exciting news.

AOL’s TechCrunch has leaked a link to AV, a still-unannounced, FaceTime-like easy video chat service from…AOL.

Yesterday, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler reported on the operating systems  used by visitors to that site. It currently breaks down like this:

Windows: 53.84%

Mac: 27.64%

iPhone: 6.72%

iPad: 3.47%

Linux: 3.28%

Android: 3.06%

iPod: .62%

MG also included historical data, and his main point is that if the trend continues, the majority of TechCrunch visitors will visit the site using an Apple device–Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad–within a couple of years.

As usual when I read numbers of these sorts, I rushed off and looked at equivalent stats for Technologizer. Here’s February 2011…

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Odd coincidence: TechCrunch’s MG Siegler and I both bought Canon’s PowerShot S95 digital camera last week. He makes a good point about the S95: For all the quality of its results, it feels fundamentally crippled by the fact it doesn’t run apps and isn’t directly connected to the Internet, as smartphone cameras are. All other traditional cameras have the same problem.

So what’s to be done? I’m not sure, especially since I don’t want to buy a point-and-shoot camera that comes with its own pricey 3G data plan. Maybe the best solution would be if it were easy to transfer photos off of an SD card directly onto a smartphone. Anyone know of any way to do that?

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler says he’s never once used the DVD burner on his MacBook Pro and is therefore excited about the possibility of a superlight, driveless MacBook Air. I keep going back and forth on whether optical drives are superfluous yet: They’re still occasionally handy for installing software, and I still use them to watch movies (or just rip them into a form I can watch on any device). I figure that three years from now, they’ll be quite unusual–but I could be wrong, since I would have guessed three years ago that they’d be almost extinct by late 2010…

TechCrunch is down again–someone with hacking skills, a vendetta, and–it seems–a dislike for certain ad formats appears to have crippled the site for the second night running.

Uberblog TechCrunch appears to have been hacked. At the moment, I’m getting either a blank screen or a “We’ll be back shortly.” message. Right before that, though, I got this (bad word censored by me, but I bet you can figure it out):

Dupedb.com looks like a porn torrent site or or somesuch–all I know for sure is that it looked so disreputable that I turned around and left within seconds of getting there.

And…the site’s back up. At least as of this moment. Details on what happened to come, I hope.

[FURTHER UPDATE, 12:20am PT: It's down again.]

[EVEN FURTHER UPDATE, 12:56am PT: Site's down, new message is up.]

I like writing about gizmos a lot more than soap operas, so when the dream that was the CrunchPad crumbled into a spat between former partners, I sort of lost interest. For the record, Fusion Garage, which decided to pursue the Web-tablet project without TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, announced its plans today. The CrunchPad is now the JooJoo. It’s $499 rather than $300. And the company will be taking preorders at TheJooJoo.com starting on Friday. That’s assuming that Arrington’s “imminent” legal action doesn’t put a crimp in the release schedule.

If you had high hopes for the CrunchPad, what we’re witnessing is the equivalent of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak squabbling on the eve of the Apple II’s release, and Woz firing Jobs. Or something like that. Anyhow, it’s kind of embarrassing. Bad JooJoo, you might say.

Fusion Garage unveiled the JooJoo this morning in a Webcast which I missed–but which was apparently made up of equal parts product demo and sniping at Arrington. The device has a 12.1″ touchscreen and Wi-Fi (but no 3G). I wish the company well. But what do you think the chances are that the JooJoo will be remembered as anything other than “that gadget was going to be the CrunchPad, and which never amounted to anything?”

Weird! Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch and father of the CrunchPad tablet computer, has blogged that the CrunchPad project is dead. He says that the manufacturing partner in charge of building the CrunchPad attempted to seize control of the device and cut TechCrunch out of its plans. Joint ownership of the project means that it can’t do so, but Arrington says it’s all over.

Mostly though I’m just sad. I never envisioned the CrunchPad as a huge business. I just wanted a tablet computer that I could use to consume the Internet while sitting on a couch. I’ve always pushed to open source all or parts of the project. So this isn’t really about money. It was about the thrill of building something with a team that had the same vision. Now that’s going to be impossible.

The news of the CrunchPad’s death comes a few weeks after rumors of…the CrunchPad’s death. But according to Arrington’s post, the project began to fall apart after the rumors of early November appeared, for a different set of reasons. (The stories had the CrunchPad being too costly to manufacture to be sold at a reasonable price.)

Arrington has always said that the CrunchPad sprung from his own desire to have a “dead simple” tablet he could use to get online from his couch. I get his desire. Well, mostly: I’ve never been entirely clear why the CrunchPad would be a better couch computer than a more typical, versatile cheap portable computer. (I’ve owned a bunch of my own personal CrunchPads over the years–they’ve just been clamshell shaped, had keyboards, run Windows, and come from companies such as Apple, Asus, and Sony.)

If the CrunchPad was really as close to being ready for prime time as Arrington says–he writes that its makers were about to start taking orders–you gotta think there’s a decent chance that it’s not really dead–only resting. Would you buy a CrunchPad, or something vaguely like a CrunchPad, if it were to come to market?

The history of technology journalists getting into the computer business isn’t full of success stories (remember Adam Osborne?). But TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and a bunch of co-conspirators have been noodling on the idea of a CrunchPad, a really cheap, simple tablet computer for surfing the Web. Yesterday, a bunch of photos “leaked” out, including some of CrunchPad that looked suspiciously close to final–in fancy boxes, yet. Then Arrington chimed in and gave an update on the project, but said he’s not ready to talk about details on availability. We still don’t know whether the CrunchPad would be a TechCrunch-branded product, or a design that other companies could license, or, for that matter, whether there are any plans to bring it to market at all.

I’m not saying I’m itching to buy a CrunchPad, but I’ve long been interested in the idea of a hunk of hardware that was designed for Web browsing and not much of anything else. I still think I want one with a real keyboard–I’ve yet to meet an on-screen substitute that I can love unreservedly–but I’m open to being convinced that I don’t need one. (I’m also intrigued by the idea of an Apple tablet, but for some mysterious reason, nobody at Apple is talking about whether it’s really working on one.)

So does the CrunchPad, or something like it, interest you?

I’m in San Diego for the DEMOFall conference, where more than seventy new products and services–mostly from startups–will debut over the next two days. You’d think that would be enough new stuff for one week in September, but DEMO is going head to head with TechCrunch 50 back in San Francisco, with 52 other debutantes, all of a Web 2.0 nature.

Did I mention that Apple is holding an event tomorrow in San Francisco at which it will unveil new iPods and possibly other items?

I’ll be blogging highlights from all three tech events here at Techologizer, and will cover even more news–albeit briefly–in my Twitter feed. Should be a fun, exhausting, and extremely newsy three days–join me, won’t you?