While entire contingents of media are getting twists in their knickers over the ucpoming iPad launch, we’d almost forget that other tablet we’ve talked about a lot – the Joo Joo. It was delayed a few times, but right now, it’s finally shipping, and Engadget already has received theirs. The iPad is more important to Engadget, so we’ll have to wait a bit for a real review, but they have lots of photos and a quick video of the device and its UI.
Some would call the Joo Joo a competitor to the iPad, but I think those people are a little… Strange. While the Joo Joo looks remarkably professional, well-designed, and dare I say it, incredibly Apple-like in almost every aspect, it’s still a glorified garage-project, more akin to Apple’s origins than Apple’s present-day. Still, comparisons are inevitable, so let’s get cracking.
For a garage project, the device looks pretty well-done, hardware-wise. On the software side, you’ll clearly see it lacks the polish Apple puts into its products, but even here the Joo Joo doesn’t look that bad, all things considered. And since it’s Linux-based, it won’t be long before people start hacking this thing, something not possible on the iPad (without being labelled a criminal, anyway). For instance, I’d want the Joo Joo to connect to my network so I can access the content stored on my server.
Specification-wise, the Joo Joo has both advantages and disadvantages compared to the iPad. The Joo Joo has a bigger screen with a higher resolution (multitouch), and one that is widescreen at that (instead of the iPad’s clumsy 4:3), which should make it better suited for video. The Joo Joo also has a USB port and a front camera for video calls, but at the same time, currently lacks a 3G option, has little to no internal storage (only 4GB), and since it’s Intel Atom-based, only has a fraction of the iPad’s battery life. For those who care: the Joo Joo has Flash, so you get the full web.
That Atom-based aspect can also be seen as an advantage: if I were to ever get one of these, I’d open the darn thing up, upgrade the storage to something a little less 1999, and throw Windows 7 on it. Or Ubuntu. Or whatever. Useful? I don’t know, but at least it’s possible.
The Joo Joo clocks in at 499 USD, and is currently only available in the US. Some OSNews team members have already pre-ordered their iPads, and we’re hoping we can get our hands on a Joo Joo as well, since the latter seems to be more in line with OSNews’ roots.
Only 90 people pre-ordered a Joo Joo tablet, 15 canceled It
In a year it will be forgotten
At least they thought different
While I agree with you that competition is suffocating newcomers when it comes to consumer and even industrial electronics, I have to add that it is not as simple as just throwing a sentence like the one you have.
At least these devices bring some fresh ideas.
The hardware specification are not that bad.
The small internal storage is easily remedied, as it’s an SSD. So it’s upgradable. It also has USB ports, giving you the option of alternative storage.
3G option is not really a big deal either. First of, it’s not really a road warrior device. It’s more for the sofa, where you already have Wi-Fi. And again the USB port may solve it, 3G USB devices are a plenty. And most probably cheaper than Apples $130 add on.
And then there is the being a stock Atom design, it’s possible to slap on nearly anything on it. Be it as you said Ubuntu or Windows 7, or more adventurous options like MeeGo, Android or ChromeOS.
But there you touch upon the second biggest problem with the device, the SW stack. The proprietary web based solution. It’s the brain child of Fusion Garage and initially what they brought in on the project. But it does not really cut it, people want a little more than just a browser. (And I suspect one of the reasons they hijacked the CrunchPad, as Arrington most likely would have dropped it in for a more marketable solution as soon as possible. Making Fusion Garage less relevant for the endeavor).
But the biggest problem with the JooJoo is the price, it’s way to expensive for hardware with all it’s limitations.
If interested in a Atom based tablet, currently I think the WePad(http://wepad.mobi/en) will become a better alternative. More internal storage(But not SSD I think), SD slot, 3G option and it’s Android based.
Purely on technical specs its a little less decked out than the iPad. Sure, it less battery saved (but faster processor), quite a bit heavier but does have a 12″ screen with a higher resolution.
That’s all OK for their first attempt – forgetting the price this thing cost. It has a chance to grow and mature and if the product is picked up and gains some momentum it could be a good alternative (or heck, throw another OS onto it!).
I’m keen to see how JooJoo and Adam (more-so) compete with the iPad and what that will mean for consumers who don’t always fall for the latest bling from Apple!
Ironically, JouJou (from the JooJoo site) means ‘Magical device’ which Steve Jobs says is apparently what the iPad is. Sounds like a fairy tale in the making, who’s going to get the happy ending? 😉
EDIT:
Here’s a break down comparison:
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/ipad-vs-joojoo-formerly-…
Edited 2010-04-02 11:38 UTC
Considering they wound up with a grand total of 75 pre-orders (compared to the iPad’s 500,000) I really doubt there will be a second attempt. Hopefully the Adam or the Microsoft Courier can provide decent competition for the iPad.
There is already decent competition for the iPad. Why is everybody acting like that every time Apples release something? There have been touch tablets on the market since years. What happens if Apple release crap? Apple invent the crap and revolutionize the tech industry?
Edited 2010-04-02 15:10 UTC
My earlier comment was not meant to be an endorsement of the iPad, it’s just that right now tablets look like they might catch on with a larger audience and Apple is the current front-runner. When I spoke about competition, I was talking about sales, not technology or features. Personally, I don’t have any interest in the iPad and do not want to see Apple dominate this market segment the way they have with the iPod.
That is exactly why tablets have so far flopped rather miserably outside of isolated segments and markets. You can’t just slap a desktop UI on them and expect it to be any good. You need a UI that really works for touch, and sorry but neither GNOME, KDE, OS X, nor Windows 7’s desktop UIs come even close. That is why people are talking about competition with Apple. It’s not only about the hardware, it’s about the software that drives it. Apple have been the first in quite a while to put a real touch-centric UI on a tablet and, unlike the others who’ve tried, they’re well enough known that it might just take off. Personally, I hope it does take off as it will prove that a touch-based tablet is viable and then we’ll see a lot of different choices coming out.
Apparently you haven’t followed the recent developments in this area… there are zillions of tablets coming out soon, mostly running Android.
Good times.
Yes I’ve been following this, and I wouldn’t say there are zillions. There are a few companies experimenting with Android on a tablet which, I must say, certainly seems pretty close to ideal. If the iPad takes off though, we’ll start seeing zillions of these devices and not just running Android. The more the better, and the more competition we see between not only tablet makers but tablet oses in general, the more new ideas will come out of it. Personally, I want a $300 3g-capable tablet running Android or some other open platform.
Right. MeeGo will be the one to watch here. I expect Android tablets to create the device base first (because it’s ready now), and people (well, Linux fans anyway) will be flashing MeeGo on the devices once it’s ready.
That’s pretty much what I’m waiting for as well, though I don’t care about 3g capability – I can just tether it through my 3g phone when outside wlan range, like people did with pre-N900 maemo tablets.
And for zillions of tablets, try:
http://i.engadget.com/tag/android+tablet/
Wrong. Archos has made tablets running linux with nice touch interface for years. They just don’t have the marketing power of Apple and the religious followers to make it sell like that.
Actually, it’s most likely because very few people know who Archos is by comparison to Apple and those who do often don’t forget their rather pathetic mp3 players from before. They picked up a bit of a bad rep for many of those.
Nokia has also made tablets for years.
I know you will find other explanations. I believe it is because Apple is good at marketing and making religious followers, that’s all. I don’t think the iPad is any better that other tablets before.
Edited 2010-04-03 14:38 UTC
It’s not that much marketing, but indeed Apple has made clear the use case for people making them realize they may want such an device.
There are combination of two major factors making the iPad better than previous generation of tablets. That is price and screen size. Make an affordable device with decent screen size, and it will sell even without much marketing and hype. Untill now the large screen tablets have been very expensive. And the Archos and Nokia devices all have to small screens, 5-7″ don’t cut it. And the 9″ Archos are close, but then again it’s more expensive.
The Archos 9 is less expensive than the iPad…
Not really, though there’s only one model. But when you consider just how bad it is, it’s far more expensive, because you’ve just thrown the entire amount of cash away.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Review-550-tablet-doesnt-make-apf-229…
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/the-archos-9-what-apples-ipa…
Obviously, if you link to Apple sponsored links, you will find they love the iPad over anything else. I see indeed it’s $539 in the US (maybe because of import taxes. In the rest of the world, it’s cheaper than the iPad. In Europe, the iPad is the same price in euros as in dollars: the cheapest model is at €499, that 1.5 times the price in dollars (about $750).
On the Archos, you don’t need to convert your video files to play them, you can surf flash web sites, you can listen to music without iTunes (that’s a +++ for the Archos). And you can make your apps! You can do all the things you would buy a tablet for. On the iPad, you can do everything your phone already does. Why you need another device to do that is still the question. Why carry such a big device to play music? The iPod already does that for much cheaper and smaller.
A lot of people in technical forums keep on missing the big picture. It is about the user experience not technical specs, because most people view these devices as a commodity not a “technological masturbation list.”
JooJoo (or whatever they are called) could have released a table with 50hr battery life, 10Ghz octocore processor and 10 GPUs in parallel to render life like 3D environment in real time… and still would not matter. These devices have to be paired with a content delivery strategy. No content, no users, no users no revenue, no revenue… bye bye.
And we don’t have to look at the iTable, which is not a proven quantity yet. Look at the kindle, from a technical standpoint nothing to croon about. But it has content and a very very polished user experience. In th same sense, look at the windows tablets: technically they are very impressive… but the user experience at the end of the day sucks because of the massive identity crisis they suffer (MS is too conservative to make any real revolutionary plunge).
And that is why windows tablets have always languished in the end, no matter how many times Microsoft tries to reintroduce them. Ironically the definition of insanity involves doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome.
Edited 2010-04-03 21:12 UTC
Purely on technical specs it has more of everything than iPad. I don’t know how someone could get that so backwards.
I was just covering bases in case someone comes around and goes ZOMG iPad is so much more PiMPED out (then again, this is OSNews, you’re all smart)! A few guys at work think very highly of the iPad and I think they’ve also pre-ordered them.
But I agree with the sentiment that you can’t just slap a desktop OS WM on a tablet like device and hope it works dandy. Its the software and gestures that really makes it work well.
And yes, I’m banking on Android devices to reign, hail and shine!
The device is a failure from the get go:
https://thejoojoo.com/store/order/new
They might as well openly state they have no interest in running a business, making money or turning the product into a success. Once again a product saved from the jaws of success by inept and pathetic management.
iPad?
The iPad will be available in Australia (and most likely New Zealand) by the end of the month. Compare that to Joojoo which has given no indication at all whether they’ve got any intention of serving the overseas market. Crap communication, crap website and crap marketing along with a myopic view of the world. Someone needs to ring them up and remind them that they aren’t living in the 1950s – they’re living in 2010 where people expect to be able to purchase products on a global scale on the day launched – even if that means having to setup a web shop that ships products to the intended destination and telling customers it is up to them to pay for the VAT/GST and any tariffs required.
Its called ‘getting with the programme’ – something many businesses are clueless at doing.
Edited 2010-04-04 09:50 UTC
But it won’t be in The Netherlands. Or in any country except for Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, the US, and the UK. Notice how NZ isn’t on that list.
I guess you are pretty selfish. Your definition of “getting with the programme” is delivering the product to YOUR country. You don’t care about anybody else. The iPad is just as constrained now as the Joo Joo, and by the end of April, only will be available in a few more countries.
Fact of the matter is that New Zealand is about as commercially interesting as the moon – we here in The Netherlands are slightly more interesting since you get Belgium as a bonus, but overall, we’re not far off from NZ.
You can’t expect a small start-up company to deliver worldwide right away. The fact that you think a start-up can shows just how little you know about business.
9/10 New Zealand is lumped in with Australia when a product is launched.
I never said *MY* country, I said available internationally – read the post and stop injecting your words into it.
Or they could have an online shop that allows someone anywhere in the world to order it and have it shipped to their country. There is nothing stopping them from doing that.
Isn’t that the former CrunchPad project, stolen by Indian contractors? http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/crunchpad-end/
Yes, this is the project that used to be called crunchpad, but as to whether or not anything was stolen (and if so, what) the jury is very much out. The article you link to is obviously very biased and the other side has a very different view on what happened.
One would have assumed the massive hubris by these pundits were exposed peddling, would have been enough to finally force them to shut the hell up. Alas…
The Archos 9 is available since almost one year and runs Windows 7 for $499. It’s very popular in France.
Edited 2010-04-02 13:32 UTC
For these reasons:
1. It’s not Apple
2. It’s cheaper than iPad
3. It does support multitasking unlike iPad that protects you from the dangers of multitasking
4. It does support Flash
5. It’s not iPad
6. People will buy iPads and will laugh at you when they will see an Joo Joo in your hands
7. It isn’t blessed by Steve Jobs
8. They must have stolen technology from Apple
9. Wait till Steve will sue their asses
10. Did I mentioned that it doesn’t have an Apple logo on it?
I’m not sure what the problem with it is.
Look at the history of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_eVilla
Now, look at the specifications of the JooJoo. Question: does the JooJoo do Java apps? (Does the iPad do Java apps? Another excellent question I’ve not seen addressed!).
Now, sure, the predecessor was much more limited in terms of OS power, RAM, and there weren’t nearly as many native apps available for it if you hacked it to make them run, and the predecessor (yes, I’m considering what I linked to the predecessor of the JooJoo, effectively) was horribly heavy and bulky by comparison, but their intended audience and purpose and software limitations are pretty much exactly the same, though, of course, software has advanced in version number and capacity to some degree, as has internal memory. But, the JooJoo has no real added utility without hacking over the hefty predecessor beyond being more portable, really.
Logical expectation: the JooJoo has no real chance of making a profit and becoming adopted outside a very limited technogeek realm, those that hack it: it may be a great hackable toy, and sure, it runs Linux underneath, so that can be worked, but unless you run an OS on it (or GUI environment) explicitly designed for touchscreen usage, along with all associated software, it’s even more limited than a netbook for capacity, since it doesn’t really have any meaningful storage onboard. Almost nobody outside the technogeek world will remember the JooJoo in a year, unless, of course, the JooJoo is advertised very heavily and the manufacturer can afford to operate at a deep loss for a long time.
The big difference is that internet has come a long way in 10 years; the target audience is much bigger now.
Not that it makes much difference, JooJoo hasn’t got a change as long as it’s as expensive as iPad.
The hardware is totally compatible with Ubuntu. So use the usb port to slap on a usb-stick or cdrom and boot off that.
Now you have a full touch-enabled computer for less than 500 bucks.
Once you are done installing, spend a bit of money on a usb 3g-dongle and you are good to go, for those that need that.
This looks like a great device in the making without any of the limitations of the iPad.
The problem with it and simialr devices such as Lenovo´s Skylight touchpad is that manufacturers think that people want a cut-down proprietary OS on top of linux, when nothing could be further from the truth. In the presentation of the lenovo skylight, I even heard Lenovo´s represenatives talking about a proprietary store for their crappy web apps.
Really, give it a break. Serve the full power of open source and people will love it.
They are trying to out-Apple Apple, which is a game you cannot win. Only Apple can sell shit in a can and call it caviar.
Did you miss my point about a desktop os on a tablet and exactly why tablets haven’t caught on the way they should have?
I don’t think that is the reason why tablets have not caught on. The real reason is much simpler, the high price of the tablet devices. Tablets have historically been priced very high. In the same price range or even more expensive than high end laptops. Given that laptops are more versatile platforms and the amount of computing power you get, people have preferred the laptops and neglected the tablets. A device only suited for a subset of tasks will not get traction in the market, if it’s more expensive(significantly so) than the more capable devices.
It would probably a combination of both factors actually. When you consider how high tablets were priced, and then factor in that desktop oses (XP tablet, anyone?) are just half-baked attempts at supporting touch over an interface that is not designed for it at all, they just weren’t attractive. Granted that Windows 7 has built-in support for multitouch, but that doesn’t change that the interface was obviously designed for a keyboard and mouse. I’d actually forgotten how high the price used to be on these tablets though, and you’re right that was most likely a huge reason as well why they just didn’t take.
It will not take long until the first people running OS X on it. Only part that is not supported might be the Multitouch.
Does not run on ARM. Ubuntu, why not?
WTH?! Did NONE of these devices implement handwritten character recognition? That’s a HUGE step backwards from the Newton and even the HWR that Paragraph had for wince(and I do).
Although I must say that I didn’t expect to see it ship with HWR on an Android based device although I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see it as a separate daemon process later with associated controller app. OTOH I’m VERY surprised that Apple didn’t ship with HWR given what they had for the Newton and the superior processing capabilities of the iPad. Seems kind of silly.
Book reading, unfortunately isn’t all that appealing to me either as I tend to read outdoors in the summer and have yet to see an LCD that can reach an adequate brightness level(or filtering) that is comfortably readable in sunlight which is why I was interested in eInk as the ONLY other close display would be mono(greyscale) LCDs however they have an unfortunate tendency to darken when exposed to heat in the form of direct or fairly direct sunlight.
Being able to browse the web w/video is nice, but I still think that I’d have to go with Nook or Spring Design’s Alex still again for outdoor readability. Unfortunately eInk(and clones) will never be able to handle video as their low power designed to shutoff after screen updates… but still sunlight readability easily trumps video display. When I’m in the house or suitably shaded areas I’ve either got a desktop or notebook which renders these things kind of useless sort of like opting to use a carving knife rather than a swiss army knife to carve the roast.
I suppose ONE place where it MIGHT be handy is in a car, but I people drive like crap already when trying to talk on the phone or text, and this would merely exacerbate that problem. Of course if it had an integrated GPS receiver…
Windows 7 (just like all other MS Windows) is completely unsuitable for tablet type machine. Ditto for Ubuntu. Who cares if it runs Linux? You need applications designed for use in this kind of machine, and I don’t think there are many in Linux/Windows world.
It’s a little tiring reading these juvenile comments about being a criminal if you hack an Apple mobile product. All Apple says it that you break your warrantee, hardly criminal.
it’s really not funny anymore, it’s just silly.