The Fusion Garage JooJoo tablet, which was formerly known as the CrunchPad, had fallen into the hands of Engadget before the release of the iPad. But for some reasons, the final review of this JooJoo tablet was out after the iPad has been launched. Anyway, parts of what Engadget says about the JooJoo are as follows:
The Fursion Garage JooJoo is a 12-inch Flash-playing tablet that lets you surf the web on your couch or while you’re on the run. The device has no physical button except the power button, it has only a touchscreen 12-inch LCD which is deemed as mistakes of the company, as it provides no easy way to get back to home screen or menus.
The JooJoo has a champagne-colored brushed aluminum backside that lets it present a sophisticated look and good hand feels. While compared with other e-readers or your iPad, the JooJoo is much larger in form factor that measures 12.8 x 7.8-inch, due to it needs to pack larger screen. And the larger form factor makes it more suitable to be used on your lap rather than using it while you’re lying down.
The JooJoo tablet has a USB port, headphone jack, microphone jack. But the USB port is meant for charging only. You can’t sideload content via the USB port as the OS of the JooJoo tablet comes completely in browser-based which doesn’t allow side loading of contents.
The JooJoo’s display is a 12-inch capacitive touchscreen that boasts 1366 x 768 resolution. The touch display responds well with light taps and swipes for making selections and scrolling down pages. When the screen is tilted to a 120-degree angle it was hard to get a great view the entire screen. However, the horizontal viewing angles are wide enough to let your share your viewing with one or two friends.
The accelerometer of the JooJoo doesn’t seem to work well, which some times you need to shake to get the screen to switch between horizontal and vertical modes. But this will be fixed in the upcoming software update. Light sensor of the device works quite well, which dims the device automatically when it’s not in use and raises the lights when it’s in dimly lit environment.
The JooJoo tablet is quite speedy as it packs with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM and 4GB solid state drive. Booting is fast takes about 7 seconds.
About the software and the OS of the JooJoo, it seems everything just like half-baked. Engadget claims the UI looks attractive from afar but a total mess up from close. The device’s Linux-based OS is centered around with shortcuts like Twitter, Hulu, divided into different categories including news, social, and entertainment. The shortcuts to those preloaded sites are helpful but no short cut to browser or short cuts that you can create by your own. So, you’ll end up of having to open one of the pre-loaded shortcuts and change from the address bar of the browser, every time you need to go to other websites.
Anyway, head over to Engadget for the full review if you wanna know what the final conclusion is and whether it’s worth your money and how it’s compared to other readers or the iPad. And they have included a few videos to walk you through with both the hardware and software.
October 27th, 2010 at 9:25 am
[...] JooJoo tablet was first the product of partnership between TechCrunch and Fusion Garage, aimed to be a low-cost tablet computer. But somehow, the partnership ended up with a number of lawsuits, leaving Fusion Garage alone to release the Joo Joo tablet. [...]