Rumors had been circulating that AOL, who owns Engadget and Webblogs Inc were about to purchase Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, and it now looks like those rumors were true as AOL has just announced that they have purchased TechCrunch.

AOL has also purchased all other sites in the TechCrunch network, which includes MobileCrunch and Crunch Gear. No details on the purchase price have been announced yet, but Business Insider is reporting that it was sold for $25 Million.

Those of us who work in the technology industry are used to writing stories about new products, testing new products and seeing early prototypes of gadgets before they debut. What isn’t common is for these prototype products to actually come from the same publications that write about them.

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch has been hard at work trying to bring a device called the CrunchPad to market. The CrunchPad is a tablet computer that runs on a Via Nano netbook CPU and has 1GB of RAM.