Hands on with the JooJoo (nee CrunchPad)

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/hands-on-joojoo-crunchpad/all/1

by AndrewDucker • 17 years ago

44 55 17 years ago

jason_tko4• 17 years ago

I get the feeling that somewhere in Cupertino, a room full of Apple engineers are giggling.

fiaz7• 17 years ago

Yes, how dare a company run by an Indian CEO put out such a remarkable device...they should be giggling their heads off.

EDIT: Based on the immediate downvotes I've received I would like to know: why should Apple engineers be giggling? Honest question.

mdemare3• 17 years ago

Because Apple's rumored to launch a tablet themselves in the next 6 months, and with all the scandals surrounding this one, they'll have even less competition.

andrew1• 17 years ago

I guess the implication was that something that Apple had designed would have been better in some way. I don't think it was intended as a slur against Fusion Garage in particular. I imagine someone would have made a similar comment regardless of who had produced this.

sounddust3• 17 years ago

You got downvoted because you baselessly accused the parent poster of being racist in his comment. If you had left out that comment and just asked the question, you would have likely been upvoted instead.

Apple engineers might be laughing because their prototype tablet - which they have likely been working on for a year - is probably far beyond the the JooJoo pad in innovation. The JooJoo pad is not bad, but it's also not particularly innovative (an iPod Touch resized to 10" would already be a better product, just to give an example).

Also, in order for the JooJoo pad to succeed, it needs strong marketing. Apple is the master of marketing, and the team behind the JooJoo pad abandoned someone who would have been an effective marketer and buzz-generator (and who gave it a great name - the CrunchPad). No matter what happened between Fusion Garage and Arrington, FG should have hired a competent marketing team to come up with a name and strategy for promoting the device.

zaatar• 17 years ago

Chandra, the CEO of Fusion Garage, is Singaporean, not Indian. He is of Indian origin (i.e. his parents were Indian) but he was born & raised in Singapore.

madair2• 17 years ago

This comment and the votes for it are just sad, and you people should be ashamed of yourselves. Welcome to groupthink, dorks.

(I'll proudly sacrifice my mojo just to sneer at this stupidity.)

zimbabwe5• 17 years ago

I won't downvote you, but you're accusing a bunch of people of upvoting that comment just because it was already upvoted, then insulting those people, then sneering at them and calling them stupid. If your goal is really to reprimand the community, you don't do it by being a douchenozzle yourself.

I upvoted the comment because, for all Wired is jizzing over it, we're talking about a product that was just released. There're no really interesting information here. And from what I see of the product, it looks painfully limited. Perhaps it executes well, but it's just not doing much. Compare to Apple, which makes products that do a lot and still manage to do it well.

So when Wired mentions how it's just like the iPhone zomg!!!, I get this little voice in my head telling me the author doesn't know what he's talking about. That makes me more willing to upvote somebody making a snide comment that I agree with.

Maybe it's not the most intelligent HN comment, but how's that become groupthink to upvote it? How's it stupid or worth your losing your mojo?

nir2• 17 years ago

"I get the feeling that somewhere in Cupertino, a room full of Apple engineers are giggling."

Since nobody here saw Apple's tablet yet, I don't get the point of the comparison. Do you automatically assume it will be miles ahead just because it's coming from Apple?

For me the "Hacker" part of Hacker News is that I tend to root for the smaller guy, with the clearly unpolished/non-existent PR dept, that actually delivered a product.

Zev• 17 years ago

For me the "Hacker" part of Hacker News is that I tend to root for the smaller guy, with the clearly unpolished/non-existent PR dept, that actually delivered a product.

For me, the "hacker" part is that I use what works for me, in ways that work for me. Not sticking with worse equipment that doesn't quite work how I want it to, simply because the company that made it isn't big (yet).

jason_tko4• 17 years ago

I automatically assume that if Apple are going to produce this rumoured tablet in early 2010, they're going to have clearly thought about what people are going to do with the device.

The biggest problem with selling a tablet is : "When and why do you use it in your life?" If the average consumer is going to drop $500+ on a flat monitor, the vendor is going to deliver a compelling story about where this device would fit into your life, and how the technology can be used to do something new, exciting, and compelling. IE, Marketing, which is Apple's forte.

I don't see any of that yet in the "JooJoo", hence my original comment which was intended as a commentary rather than a sneer.

chanux• 17 years ago

I expect some branding issues.

daveungerer2• 17 years ago

But it only has Wi-Fi connectivity. That means unless you are in a hotspot with blazing fast Wi-Fi, the tablet can seem terribly slow.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average Wi-Fi is much faster than 3G or Wimax. Unless the reviewer is suggesting that someone would want to plug a tablet into a wired LAN.

jrnkntl• 17 years ago

Watching streaming HD video doesn't go that well with a slow internet connection through Wifi, I guess that's what the author is aiming for.

jason_tko4• 17 years ago

With the new 802.11N WiFi protocol, HD streaming works great on a speedy internet connection.

ZeroGravitas2• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's just nonsense. They tried to say something about it only having Wi-Fi and then just lost the plot.

Also these days you can bridge from 3G to Wifi via external devices which makes this slightly less of an issue.

daveungerer2• 17 years ago

In retrospect, I shouldn't have expected good writing from an "OMG we have to be the first to preview this gadget" article, even from Wired.

DrJokepu2• 17 years ago

I would actually consider buying one if it could run a proper OS (e.g. proper Windows or proper Linux). I have been looking for a device for ages I could use for reading e-books in bed before sleep (notebooks are too "heavyweight" for that and I think that the Kindle and other e-book reader hardware are way too underpowered and painful to use).

This one looks like it has just the right dimensions and a responsive iPhone-like touchscreen would make it really easy to use for reading.

rajasaur• 17 years ago

Wouldnt it be possible to do the same through an iPod or iPod Touch? Given that the joojoo has no keyboard or apps, there isnt much of an advantage except for the screen dimensions.

thalur• 17 years ago

But a larger screen is (potentially) well worth having. I find my iphone is a little on the small side for serious web browsing - its good for the occasional wikipedia hunt, but its not particularly pleasant to read large amounts of text on.

DrJokepu2• 17 years ago

Well I've got a G1 which is very similar in this respect to the iPhone (although the touchscreen is a bit less responsive and the config is slower) and in my experience it's quite a painful experience to read books on it. The screen is very small and generally it isn't as much fun as reading a dead tree book. Also, it can't read Microsoft Reader .lit files (which is a very common e-book format) so I would prefer something Windows based.

dagw• 17 years ago

For a potential reading pad I'd say that screen size is pretty huge advantage, especially if you are reading texts that also contain images. If there is a pdf reader for the joojoo I might actually be interested.

astine• 17 years ago

Hang it on the wall in the kitchen and use it as a digital bulletin board.

I've been thinking of a product that could use a prepackaged webserver on the users home network, (or a or an Internet service) to provide a calendering and home organization service on the a users home system and this would make an ideal interface for a kitchen/bathroom/hallway.

If only it were at the old promised price-point.

mahmud2• 17 years ago

JooJoo runs a custom OS created by Fusion Garage, which means it’s unlikely to have the cool apps from independent developers that made the iPhone a hit or juiced the PC ecosystem.

How custom is it if it runs Flash? Gnash is not powerful enough to recompile across platforms and play video off of Hulu. And I don't think they have the binary-translation technology to convert the flash-player binary, or even flash swf/flv files, to their own binary format (if they did, they wouldn't be in the gadget manufacturing business; they would be entitled to double digits in Adobe's shares/market-share.)

So, Wired, what Linux or Windows Mobile based OS is JooJoo really running? You couldn't get your hands on the device just long enough to find out? Tried about:config or similar tricks? How about finger-printing the hell out of it with nmap until you arrive at a ballpark?

pmjordan• 17 years ago

They are probably just running a browser directly on the framebuffer (no X) on a Linux kernel. It seems a lot can pass for a "custom OS" these days. "Custom app launcher" seems more appropriate.

ZeroGravitas2• 17 years ago

They've publicly stated it's "unix-based" or some such nonsense, so it's linux.

veemjeem• 17 years ago

freebsd can also run flash pretty well too, so it might be bsd based too... I haven't tried hulu on my system yet, but most flash sites work pretty well so I'd be surprised if hulu doesn't work.

atamyrat• 17 years ago

I met one of their engineers earlier this year.

He said it runs Linux, WebKit and GTK+ for UI. Of course if they hadn't changed it since then.

fiaz7• 17 years ago

JooJoo is an interesting gadget only if you buy into the premise of a completely web-oriented lifestyle. That means using just the internet and what it offers. There’s no way to save documents locally or access .pdf files or create documents and presentations locally.

I'm getting bored of this and speculation by journalists that this device won't sell for the going price. Does anybody remember how many units of the first Kindle sold? It really feels as though the "journalistic" opinions about this device have more to do with siding with Arrington than actually talking about the merits of this accomplishment.

zimbabwe5• 17 years ago

Wait, what does the Kindle have to do with anything? I remember journalists loving the Kindle when it came out. There was a slight backlash months after the original sold out, but it's been very positively received by everybody but Hacker News, which still thinks Amazon is Orwellian because let's face it, we're not quite as bright as we think we are.

Are you saying JooJoo is interesting if you don't buy into the completely web-oriented whatever? Because they're not saying It won't sell for this price in your quote. They're just saying, unless your goal is to use the Internet, this isn't what you want.

fiaz7• 17 years ago

I remember journalists loving the Kindle when it came out.

Exactly my point. Throw in the fact that Google is putting all of their effort into relying fully on the web/cloud, I would think that the journalists would love this device too.

kenshi• 17 years ago

The pictures of said device look nice, but $500 for a web only tablet seems a bit steep. But then, perhaps there is a market for such a device - for people who only use web apps and want something convenient to surf the web on.

In some ways I think it is a rival to the litl netbook. And of course, with Apple's reputation and all the rumours of an Apple tablet they are going to have to face a market which will include a lot of people who are just going to wait and see what Apple release.

Still its nice to see a new company producing some hardware. Will be interesting to see how they do.

jlgosse• 17 years ago

The biggest issue for this device is the fact that it is supposed to be used as a web browsing device only - yet it only supports wi-fi. I think that is a huge oversight.

How will one use this anywhere if you can't connect to a 3G network?

buymorechuck• 17 years ago

From watching videos of JooJoo, UI latency and scrolling performance are quite terrible.

It seems that rendering is done on the CPU, when it should've been on a GPU accelerated compositor or tiled surface manager.

That would probably save significant battery life (which we haven't heard anything about) and really kick ass at performance.

SoC GPU + CPU combos are fairly inexpensive parts, but even the first gen iPhone PowerVR MBX lite would've had reasonable performance.

More ranting on my blog: http://www.satine.org/archives/2009/12/08/gpu-my-joojoo/

eli• 17 years ago

So how are they not screwed once the first Chrome tablet comes out?

It's basically the same thing, but Chrome OS is open source and has the weight of a massive company behind it.

Hands on with the JooJoo (nee CrunchPad)

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