And that basically means a lot of things. JooJoo was considered to be a vaporware extraordinaire after the whole CrunchPad-JooJoo Fusion Garage-Arrington spat broke out. We were pretty sure that this thing would be too tied down with litigation to make it out in one piece. Turns out that there wasn’t all that much reason to doubt its existence. This announcement from Fusion Garage basically means they have figured out all the legal details and most importantly — they have found a manufacturer. As for the app store, well, that I am not too sure about yet.
Fusion Garage issued a release which said that they had tied up with Malayasia’s largest OEM — CSL — who have agreed to manufacture the JooJoo Tablets in exchange of a percentage of the revenue. The OS apparently remains the same and it will debut with an app store, which according to Fusion Garage will be bigger than iTunes App Store becuase JooJoo has the “entire Internet” to count on. I just hope they won’t take all the web apps available everywhere and call them JooJoo’s ‘App Store’. Surprise!
The original dimensions remain the same. It will be a 12.1 inch capacitive touchscreen with an LCD display. Price will be a competitive $499 to keep up with the iPad. In fact, Fusion Garage is going to put this as a direct competitor of the iPad. They hope that the openness and the larger screen will attract buyers away from Apple’s iPad. However, it has to be pointed out that the UI design and the online store integration is likely to be far worse than Apple’s offering in every way.
JooJoo is thus already being manufactured deep within Malayasian territory and it will be shipping by the end of this month. Whether it really makes it to the hands of the consumers, only time will tell. It is quite clear that Fusion Garage is trying to preempt the iPad by shipping this month but it has to be kept in mind that hurrying up shipping dates usually has really bad consequences for the device itself.
There are usually a lot of software glitches that need ironing out and that takes time to test. The time that is shortened by this kind of haste. And since this is a debutant device from a debutant company, I am not expecting much from them. Let’s just hope it can run for more than 2 hours without crashing or running out of power. Both of which are very likely to happen, by the way.
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- Toshiba JournE the Missing Apple Tablet XL, Also App Store Rival in the Making
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“I just hope they won’t take all the web apps available everywhere and call them JooJoo’s ‘App Store’. Surprise!” – Actually that’s exactly their plan, according to the actual interview. The expression was to be taken figuratively, not literally.