D. JonesJooJoo Voodoo! Another Tablet Contender?
April 7th 2010 12:00
The JooJoo (formerly known as the CrunchPad) created by Fusion Garage has finally landed! There are now at least FOUR capacitive touchscreen, browsing-heavy slate tablets on the market! Sure, it's probably not the best timing for a tablet start-up, but that doesn't diminish interest in the 12-inch, Flash-playing JooJoo (STUPID name for starters!) The JooJoo is meant to be a browser-based tablet for surfing the web on your couch or while traveling. But will it be a $499 experience inferior or superior to Apple's iPad? Only time will tell! The JooJoo is a beautifully crafted piece of hardware, and even if the iPad wasn't out there for comparisons, its minimalistic design would remind us of an aesthetically pleasing Apple product. The front of the device is nothing but LCD, and the slightly recessed power button on the left edge is the only physical button on the entire thing. The lack of hardware controls is possibly one of the biggest mistakes, since there's no easy way of getting back to the menu or home screen.
The champagne-colored brushed aluminum backside of the tablet certainly gives everything a sophisticated look, and it also feels really nice in hand, if just a tad flimsy in the middle due to its expansiveness (i.e. big as hell!) But a "handheld" the 12.8 x 7.8-inch JooJoo is not, at least not in comparison to the iPad or other e-readers, like the Kindle or Nook. The larger and heavier form factor makes it more of a sit up / lap device, rather than something you can use lying down and holding it up (More carpal tunnel syndrome..were these things designed by a surgeon to drum up more business?) Obviously, the payoff is in the bigger screen and its a 2.4-pound, 0.7-inch thick device when it comes to portability, but using one hand with this thing is pretty much out of the question!
It has a single USB port, a standard headphone jack, and a microphone jack live on the right edge. You can use the USB port to charge the device, but that's all it will do since the operating system is completely browser-based and doesn't allow for side loading music, video, or pictures (Can you say.. BORING!) The camera on the top of the screen is apparently meant for video conferencing, but attempts to video chat through Meebo or Tokbox failed (Shocker!) Obviously, the JooJoo's heart and soul is its 1366 x 768, capacitive 12-inch display. The responsiveness of the glass display, light taps and swipes were all we needed to make selections / scroll down pages as long as the software was keeping up (the device had to be restarted a couple times to get things working again touch-wise!) but viewing angles are less than stellar. Unlike Apple's IPS display, colors fade quickly when the screen is tilted to a 120-degree angle and when held up while lying down, it's hard to position it to get a great view of the entire screen (No fancy maneuvers allowed!) The horizontal viewing angles are wide enough for sharing the screen with a friend or two, though (or ten!) Getting the screen to rotate from vertical to horizontal can at times be a bit of a crapshoot, sometimes the accelerometer decides it'd like to pitch in and adjust just perfectly and other times it needs a bit of a shake to rotate (Sounds like a piece of crap!).
The sensitivity will be tweaked in an upcoming software update, along with the speed of rotation. Luckily, the ambient light sensor is much more accountable, dimming the screen when not in use and raising the lights in dimly lit situations, but unfortunately it's positioned right where you might be likely to rest a thumb when holding the tablet in a landscape orientation, causing plenty of unintentional dimming (Bummer!) The two speakers on the back of the tablet sound like typical netbooks speakers, they're loud enough for personal listening, but won't fill a room (It's NOT a stereo!)
The iPad (right) and the JooJoo (left) hit the hands of consumers on the same weekend! Photo by Engadget.
That is one BIG tablet!
The homepage shortcuts are certainly helpful if you are looking to go to one of the preloaded sites, but there's no simple browser shortcut if you just want to put in your own URL. Instead you're stuck opening one of the shortcuts and changing the address (Can this thing get ANYTHING right?) And that's all there really is to the entire OS, there aren't any onboard applications for viewing pictures or music, the only other screen is just a settings section for adjusting the WiFi or brightness. And from anywhere on the device you can swipe down at the top of the screen to bring up a navigation bar, which includes browser controls.
The web viewing experience on the device is what you'd expect; pages look very nice on the wide display. The biggest problem with the basic viewing is the 16:9 screen ratio, which renders regular sites with extra room on each side in landscape, but crops in on the sides of sites when held vertically. JooJoo is trying to provide a straight pixel-accurate representation of web sites, but they could've picked a better screen ratio to do it. A smaller foible is a mere fact of Linux: type isn't rendered as cleanly as on a Mac or Windows machine, and not all fonts are supported. A purely web-based device needs to have excellent navigation features, and the JooJoo, doesn't have those! Seems like there's so much wrong with it, where does one begin? It's hard to put a finger on the biggest complaint, but the fact that the navigation bar atop the browser isn't locked in place seems to be the largest frustration (That just doesn't make sense!) Instead, every time you want to move backwards, forwards, or input a new URL you have to swipe a finger downward to bring it up (EXTREMELY annoying!)
It's a real shame that it doesn't just work! Speaking of swiping downwards, two-finger scrolling happens to be very smooth, but one finger scrolling isn't supported (You've GOT to be kidding, right?) That happens to be annoying when holding the device with one hand since you can't just use a thumb, or with two hands because you have to drop one hand to do scrolling, or use a dual thumb method. Pinch to zoom isn't a feature either, so trying to enlarge text or small web buttons to make selections doesn't work! There are two onscreen keyboard options: one for inputting short text and another, wider one that appears when the screen is flipped horizontally for longer typing. Both can be dragged to different places on the screen and are decently sized, but trying to type a long email or instant message is cumbersome, especially with the lack of predicative text or automatic capitalization. Oh, and hopefully you are okay with not using an apostrophe, while it has the key when selected it ends up inputting an open quote (another little item with a promised software update.)
Even more inexplicable was the fact that sometimes the keyboard didn't register key presses at all, or only on the third or fourth try. A hard reset got things humming again, but one should not live in fear of losing the ability to use the keyboard! The truth is one could go on and on about software flaws! Talk about rushing to get a product out no matter how many "bugs" there are!
Software issues aside, the JooJoo actually happens to be quite speedy thanks to its 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM and 4GB solid state drive. It only takes about 7 seconds to boot and toggling between the menus is snappy. WiFi speeds were also quite fast with it taking 11 seconds to load Engadget and 8 seconds to bring up NYTimes.com. But what about Flash? This is supposed to be the big differentiator, right? The iPad killer! In an interesting move, Fusion Garage coupled the Atom processor with NVIDIA's Ion graphics to aid in playing full screen Flash video. Unfortunately, the software just isn't there yet.
Currently the device is running Flash 10.1 beta 1, and won't have hardware-accelerated Flash video for a good while now (the timing is partly reliant on Adobe support, and is labelled as a "work in progress" by JooJoo). That means some regular-sized YouTube and Hulu works, as decoded by the CPU, but full screen Hulu is jittery, and a 720p YouTube clip is like watching a slideshow. JooJoo claims you can get 5 hours if you avoid Flash entirely but need I remind you, that the iPad lasts over 10 hours on a charge. There are just so many things, Fusion Garage (or is it Full of Garbage?) did differently with the JooJoo. Even putting aside the fact that Apple's $499 iPad brings more to the table than just web browsing, the JooJoo is less portable, has a worse (if larger) screen, is unintuitive to use, and ships with half-baked software. The start-up is commended on its nice piece of hardware design, but until the software is given some much-needed love (and the price needs to be SERIOUSLY re-evaluated!)
To add insult to injury, Apple's entry level iPad provides a much more seamless and feature-packed experience, and there are plenty of $199-ish ARM-based tablets just around the corner. This is terrible timing! The one shining light, is that Fusion Garage has actually managed to finish and build this thing, which is a lot more than can be said for the dozens of ARM / Tegra / Fairy dust-powered, Android / Linux / CE-based tablet prototypes just blowing smoke up our butts! Hopefully, Fusion Garage improves over time! And as far as competition with the iPAD, this AIN'T it....yet!
Check out the video (sorry for the guy's accent and occasional mumbling!)
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